Flash videos stop playing in LMS

Jul 27, 2012

Alan Beadle
By Alan Beadle

I've created a course that contains three Flash videos (.flv files) embedded in PowerPoint slides. The size of the files are 23Mb, 24Mb and 30Mb. When I publish the course for Web and view the presentation, everything plays as it should.

I then published the course in LMS format for our suppliers to upload to the LMS system that we we use. When playing the course via the LMS, one slide does not begin playing the video, the second plays for about 5 seconds and stops, the third plays for about 35 seconds and stops playing. I have tried playing the LMS course on two different PCs, and the same thing has happened.

I have also noticed that the same videos play correctly in another course on the same LMS. This course has 40 slides whereas the other course has 67. Could this be a factor?

Do you think this problem could be caused by a bandwidth restriction? If so, is reducing the size or downgrading the quality of the videos likely to enable the videos to play all the way through?

Any help appreciated!

5 Replies
Alan Beadle
over 11 years ago07/31/12 at 11:17 am (UTC)

Hi Peter! - Thanks for the information.

As suggested, I uploaded the course to SCORM Cloud. Everything played as it should.

I had to make some updates to the course, so I created a new version and sent it to be uploaded to the LMS system. When I run the new version from the LMS, all three videos play to the end, although they do pause for a second here and there.

Here is a question to try to help understand this further. When you move to a slide that contains a Flash video, does it stream from the LMS and then play, or is it downloaded to the Client/Player and then played? If so, what might cause it to freeze here and there? If I reduce the size of the video in the slide, or downgrade the video quality, is this likely to help?

Peter Anderson
over 11 years ago08/01/12 at 12:44 pm (UTC)

Hey Alan

Good question. In short, yes. And another way to improve the download time for your courses, is to adjust the overall Quality at which you publish your presentations. Here's how.

Also, to configure optimal bitrates for your videos, see this bitrate calculator provided by Adobe.
 
If you have included SWF files in your presentations, you might consider using one of the following custom pre-loaders to improve playback:
 
Hope that's helpful!

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