Videos freezing randomly
Jan 03, 2019
By
Leah Ricker
Hi. I've been struggling with 2 videos built by a vendor that need to be included in our LMS. I created a Storyline 360 module with both videos added. They are each 30 min in length (I know that's not ideal for a number of reasons). The issue I'm having is with the videos freezing in random places. We decreased the size of the files to MP4s because the original MOVs were huge, but we're still having issues with random freezing.
I'm wondering if it is browser related - so far, the people seeing this behavior were using Chrome.
One thing the vendor brought up is the bitrate. Does anyone know if there is a maximum recommended bitrate?
Thanks
34 Replies
We are experiencing the same issue. Videos imported into articulate Storyline 360 keeps freezing randomly. This occurs only when we publish in the LMS setting. We have ruled out that it is not an internet or LMS issue because this occurs when we publish the files locally to our desktop. Our videos are under 2 minutes long. If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this issue I would greatly appreciate it.
Hi Fern!
We can definitely help troubleshoot this issue! If you import the videos into a new project, do they freeze there as well?
It's hard to determine why the videos are freezing without seeing the .story file. Do you mind sharing that with us? You can either attach it to this public discussion or privately in a support case.
Following this closely, as we are having very similar issues. Does not seem to affect all users. Mostly in Chrome as far as we can tell. Re-rendering the video sometimes will fix.
Thanks for following, Kathy!
We'd be happy to help investigate and help determine what's causing your videos to freeze. Are you editing, saving, and publishing your project locally rather than a network drive?
If possible, can you share one of the troublesome files with our team for testing purposes? We'll reach out with our findings soon after!
After a lot of investigation here we think we may have isolated the problem. Our Checkpoint firewall may have been causing issues when we were publishing courses that caused the videos to pause/freeze in random spots. We had several people publish the same articulate file and the individuals that had checkpioint enstalled on their computer had issues while others did not.
It seems to have fixed the problem for now. However, we still find that videos jump a little at the beginning when they are loading to play. Not sure if this could be something that Articulate can solve in the future to make the loading and initial play of videos smoother. Is anyone else experiencing this?
I'm glad that you were able to isolate the issue, Fern. I appreciate you popping back in with an update.
We'd be happy to look at the video issue you are experiencing. Please share your project file with our support engineers here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.
After export I found that some videos were freezing in Chrome and Edge, but not Firefox. After setting the video compression from automatic to none, this has solved the issue. As mentioned in this thread, https://handbrake.fr/ is a great open source tool to use to minimize file size.
Not sure if this has been mentioned.
I've been having on going issues with this freezing video bug and I'm not entirely sure its just a browser issue.
I wanted to see if the videos were freezing before being uploaded - so I published my course to LMS, then extracted the file to my desktop so that I can view all the video content that is in the course and found that the same videos would freeze in the in the extracted file even before I uploaded them to the LMS.
Videos can even freeze when uploaded to Review 360
I have also found that storyline will sometimes pick videos at random to freeze and sometimes videos that were fine in earlier exports would be freezing in later exports. Deleting the slide and reimporting the video doesnt seem to work.
I don't believe this is entirely due to file size either as I have larger videos that are fine whilst some smaller videos will freeze.
The only way I've been able to fix this issue my self is to rexport the my videos from Premiere Pro. As always saved to desktop, mp4, etc.
As we are moving more into video led learning, it would be great if this issue can be resolved. :)
Hi Tim,
Thanks for reaching out!
Since re-exporting your videos in Premiere Pro fixes the issue for you, there's a chance that the issue might be because of the encoding process being used by your video application. One way to test this is to re-encode any affected videos using a tool called Handbrake, and then testing to see if this fixes the issue. Here's a helpful video which shows how to use Handbrake to re-encode.
If you have any additional questions or clarifications, feel free to reach out to our support team here, and if you're willing to share a copy of your video file, we'll be glad to take a closer look at it for you!
Hi Joe, I really appreciate the quick reply!
I have videos exported from Premiere that work perfectly fine and then one day won't export properly, I would also have videos given to me from another department, perhaps a Teams meeting screen record, which would also freeze.
It might be worth also noting that the videos would play perfectly fine when I preview the slide/scene/course, but only corrupt when I export either to Review 360 or LMS.
I've noticed there's a lot of different experiences in this 3 year old thread, hopefully a more global solution can be found. :-)