hacking imsmanifest and player.xml to point to a new video source

Oct 13, 2011

I have a course that we have lost the source file to.   We are moving the course to a new LMS that  won't accomodate the large embedded movie files.   After looking at the mentioned xml files it seems like I should be able to hack them and force the course to look to another url or path to find the flv  files.  Are there other xml files involved in this?   Can i not insert a set of webobject xml entries pointing at the video file in place of the local reference to the video?    Can you direct me to any  information on what files need to be edited to do this?  Thanks!

4 Replies
Brian Batt

Hi Kim & welcome to Heroes,

Modifying published contents isn't supported by Articulate.  However, I can help push you in the right direction.  You'll want to take a look at the presentation.xml file located in the data folder.  Most of the references that you're looking for are there.  Of course, you may need to modify your manifest file to get everything to work on the LMS side.

Kim  Brown

Brian,

Thanks for the reply.  I've published a short course with a link pointing to an external video so that I could compare what the two approaches are (local video vs linked video). When there is a locally loaded video file I find a  path reference in imsmanifest.xml  pointing to the data folder. When using a hyperlink there is no such path statement in the imsmanifest but there are a group of  web object tags that contain references to the url of the video.   Following Frankensteins method I've been hacking segmemts of code from the url based presentation.xml with url referenced video and pasting it into the  locally referenced presentation.xml.    When I run the course and advance to the slide with the web object in it I just get a slide with a background and no player loaded. 


Do you know of any sites where some of the parts of the  imsmanifest and presentation. xml files and their relationships are explained.    Thanks again Brian.

onEnterFrame (James Kingsley)

Is the video currently embedded in the slide as a Flash Movie or is it a web object? For it to be a web object it will need it's own player, html page, etc...

You might try this. 

Create a one slide course with the video inserted as web object, pulling from your server.

Publish that course and test it.

If it works copy and paste the slide's info from one presentation.xml to the other. You may need to change a few items like slide numbers.

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