If user moves to another tab on his browser while the course is running the content will stop moving while the narrator will keep speaking which leads to difference between the displayed content and the narrator voice
Was this published with Storyline 3 or 360? It sounds similar to an issue we reported to our team, where the audio kept playing even if you've navigated away from that tab.
It is specific to the HTML5 output - so we're looking into the behavior, but you could point to the Flash output?
I can see that you’re still struggling with the audio not pausing with the timeline since you reached out here and in this other discussion. Thanks for letting me know you're using Storyline 3. I'll be sure to come back to this thread to notify you as soon as we find a fix!
Was there ever a fix for this? Our company decided to go with Storyline 3 due to budget reasons and having the audio continue while moving to other tabs/browsers is causing clients to look at other developers. This is a serious issue for us and the fact that it is fixed in 360 and not in Storyline 3 is disappointing. I would also like to be notified when this is fixed.
Thanks for checking in, Adam! I'm sorry you've run into this too.
The fix for this bug is in the works for Storyline 3 and you're in the right place for notifications. We'll share the good news with you as soon as it's released.
what do you mean by 'fixed'? That audio will also stop when switching to a different tab or the whole content will play along when switching to a different tab? Or maybe the behaviour can be controlled?
edit:
Ok, I checked the storyline360 output. The content is still paused when switching to a different tab. Well, my game is useless in html5. We should be able to decide the behaviour of such events...
It sounds like you were looking for the issue to still be present as it worked for your game? I'm sorry to hear that it's caused you some unexpected trouble. 😕
Perhaps you could share a copy of your game, and the community can weigh in with other ideas and solutions to help you accomplish the set up you need!
When you run html5 version and switch tabs, the timer will stop. Flash version works ok.
And I think you can pretty agree with me, that's not wanted behaviour, in any case. If the problem with sound not stopping along with slide have been resolved in Articulate360 - something went wrong. Audio AND slide shouldn't stop at all when tab is switched!
IF someone wants availability to allow users STOP/PAUSE the course, he/she can enable a seekbar with pause button. In any other case, it's a problem for course developer, because without editing the storyline app.min.js you cannot solve that problem (it has something to do with onblur and onfocus javascript functions - but I myself can't fix it). And when also we have something like baselayer is paused when switching tab, but audio or video goes freely... well, that's not ok.
ANY course based on time will crash with this behaviour. No simple time-limited questions, not mentioning any advanced synchronization.
"You are welcome to share your ideas with our team here if you'd like."
Thanks Leslie for the contact, but unfortunately, I've been sharing my ideas with the team since 2012 and never heard back from them, nor even wishing to my ideas come true, so I will just pass on this idea ;)
I hope you or Ashley, as staff members, can point to them that issue as a serious issue, because the storyline output is just... faulty. And to make things clear - if they could make scripts pause audio alongside with timeline, that it's simple to not pause anything at all. They know where to search and probably they exactly now what to edit.
Thanks for sharing those examples. As far as feature requests go, we've recently revamped our process to help our product team prioritize, and you can read about that here. We don't typically respond to the Feature request emails, unless our team needs clarification - as you can imagine, we see a lot of emails and a lot of different ideas! But they are read by our team and organized so that we can accurately track them!
I'll pass this discussion along to our team and let them take a look at the examples you shared.
It's not like I'm expecting to immediately post an upgrade to Storyline (3 in my case). But if they can share a workaround like editing some output files, that would be really, really great and could save me some inconvinient talk with client :) I've seen that this problem Was reported earlier (12 months ago) and even Leslie commented on it. :)
Yes, we had the issue where the audio kept playing and the animations stopped if you went to another tab. It looks like the fix, stopped the audio and animations in HTML5, whereas in Flash it showed the audio stopped and the animations continued. It's not what I'd expect either (as Flash and HTML5 should match) so I'm going to file a new issue with my team to take a look.
I honestly could talk myself in circles for what *should* happen - but I agree that the audio/animations should be in sync...either stopped or continuous while on another tab/window and it should be the same for HTML5/Flash.
I'd love to have your .story file as well to include in that report, if you can share. If you need to share privately you can also upload it to me here.
I would also like to be notified once the program is doing either of the same function. I don't care which, it should just either stop or keep playing both media.
"I honestly could talk myself in circles for what *should* happen"
Ashley, I'm sorry, but not at all :) When you open youtube video and switch tab - does it stop? When you open mobile game or multiplayer and you switch tab/window - does it stop? When you run podcast on some site and you switch tab - does it stop?
That's the beauty of Storyline - you could use it for so many things. When I saw your timer I assume you want to move the user forward throughout the course, and if they're not paying attention on a slide because they've opened a new tab I'd say keep the time and music going!
On the flip side of that, as you shared a Youtube video would stop (not just the audio, but a whole video) and that's expected. So a few different use cases here.
Either way, I agree that HTML5 and Flash should match, and that the audio and slide elements should be in sync. So if one stops, they both stop. That's why I wanted to get all the information possible into the hands of my team - they're the best equipped to figure out next steps.
Thanks for your patience while we took a look at this! Our team implemented an additional fix in the latest update to help with the continued issue where an animation continues to play in HTML5 when navigating away from the browser tab.
Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for each application (in this case Storyline). Details here.
Great news! We just released Update 3 for Storyline 3. This includes quite a few important fixes and some new features as well. Check out all the details in the release notes here.
The item you'll be interested in is:
Audio continued to play in HTML5 output when switching to another browser tab, causing animations to become unsynchronized.
Now I just need to find a code responsible for stopping playback when switching tabs, and make it NOT stopping it, so I can have time-limited questions! ;)
PS Leslie or Ashley, you are doing a great work here and there on the forums, answering like every question asked and trying to help, like rest of the staff, but have you ever considered to delegate someone from developers to aid some of us who have more complicated issues? Now the html5 course output is basically some html, some css, and plenty of js. And all of these files can be edited after publishing course, so it's way more flexible than it used to be with flash output. However, based on my observation on forums, you (I mean, the whole staff :)) sometimes answer with "We are sorry, it's not possible, please submit feature request" and then some user pops in and says "edit the file X and Y like this and it would work", and it works. Having someone from devs here to answer those more custom questions would be a huge addition to community. But that's merely just a humble suggestion from user, who constantly wants his courses better and better. I always try to share with other users some hacks I've found myself, but there's still plenty to discover.
As for the modyfing output - yes, of course I know there is no support for this. And I didn't except anyone to give us full support for this changes. My suggestion was more like "hey, can you check, if someone can sometimes pop to give general tip, where you can search to achieve desired effect" :) Like you replied to my post about background audio playing - someone from staff could write "hey, that's not officialy supported, but you can try to edit story.html and paste there some audio tag and experiment". Also, concering this particular topic - some dev could pop and write "hey, try to look in file .js for function(stopcourse), maybe you'll be succesful" :)
"Regarding the behaviour of video and audio pausing when switching tabs, I believe this is something that is typically controlled by the browser." Probably yes, but... before update we had a problem that audio was playing when tab had been switched. After update, audio is not playing. So, in this case, what controls behaviour? :)
Also, all that stuff about timers, I don't think it applies to storyline output content at all. Browser doesn't stop javascript timers, you can check at this fiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/wr1ua0db/17/ so, it's purely dependant on site, not on browser (didn't check safari tho).
And once again - I highly appreciate the work staff is doing! I see in other threads that they are helping everyone :) I'm maybe a bit frustrated, because sometimes I came with something brilliant ;) in my mind for a new training and storyline is bottleneck :(
And concerning this topic particular again - well, to be honest, there is still some inconsistency. :) it will pause audio, video, it will pause the timeline. But as I'm writing this post, I made dummy quiz with results slide and option "end quiz after 5 minutes". And it sits in another tab of my chrome. And, well, audio has stopped, timeline has stopped, but quiz time moves on :)))))) So, at all, Storyline agrees with me - time should move on when you have quiz opened on another tab :)
Am wondering if there have been any updates on this - I want a user to be able to go to a different tab but still have their courses PLAY, NOT STOP when they leave the tab. This should be the choice of the designer when publishing the courses shouldn't it? All other content on my lMS continues to play if you move away from it, but the courses I create in storyline do not. People can't always be stuck in their browers, sometimes they need to continue to do work and just want to hear the audio while they are doing it. Please help!
Hi, does the latest Storyline 360 update fix this or similar issue? When running eLearning published from last month's update the video's keep playing when in other web browser or open a new web tab however the seekbar pauses, so when the learner returns to the eLearning there is a video / seekbar mismatch.
33 Replies
Hi Sinchu,
Was this published with Storyline 3 or 360? It sounds similar to an issue we reported to our team, where the audio kept playing even if you've navigated away from that tab.
It is specific to the HTML5 output - so we're looking into the behavior, but you could point to the Flash output?
The issue is with HTML5 and we have used storyline 3 to publish the build.
Thanks, Sinchu. I'll add your experience to our report. We'll let you know once we have more information!
Dito the issue from Sinchu, we are using the html5 output and also used storyline 3 to publish.
Hi there Christian,
I can see that you’re still struggling with the audio not pausing with the timeline since you reached out here and in this other discussion. Thanks for letting me know you're using Storyline 3. I'll be sure to come back to this thread to notify you as soon as we find a fix!
Hey Christian,
I have some great news!
We just released another update for Articulate 360, and included a few important fixes and new features that you'll see in the release notes here.
This update fixes the issue you reported where audio continued to play in the HTLM5 output when switching to another browser tab.
Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for each application. Details here.
Please let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly!
Hey there Sinchu,
We're still working on rolling out a fix for Storyline 3 as well, and we'll keep you posted as soon as it's available!
Was there ever a fix for this? Our company decided to go with Storyline 3 due to budget reasons and having the audio continue while moving to other tabs/browsers is causing clients to look at other developers. This is a serious issue for us and the fact that it is fixed in 360 and not in Storyline 3 is disappointing. I would also like to be notified when this is fixed.
Thanks for checking in, Adam! I'm sorry you've run into this too.
The fix for this bug is in the works for Storyline 3 and you're in the right place for notifications. We'll share the good news with you as soon as it's released.
Hey Ali,
what do you mean by 'fixed'? That audio will also stop when switching to a different tab or the whole content will play along when switching to a different tab? Or maybe the behaviour can be controlled?
edit:
Ok, I checked the storyline360 output. The content is still paused when switching to a different tab. Well, my game is useless in html5. We should be able to decide the behaviour of such events...
Hi Mateusz,
It sounds like you were looking for the issue to still be present as it worked for your game? I'm sorry to hear that it's caused you some unexpected trouble. 😕
Perhaps you could share a copy of your game, and the community can weigh in with other ideas and solutions to help you accomplish the set up you need!
Hello Mateusz,
Glad you were able to double check the behavior and see how it will affect your course.
You are welcome to share your ideas with our team here if you'd like. It is most helpful when someone has a specific use-case to visualize the need.
Hello Ashley and Leslie, thanks for reply.
I won't share the game itself but I can share the mechanism:
http://www.inquest.pl/scorm/timer_html5/
http://www.inquest.pl/scorm/timer_flash/
When you run html5 version and switch tabs, the timer will stop. Flash version works ok.
And I think you can pretty agree with me, that's not wanted behaviour, in any case. If the problem with sound not stopping along with slide have been resolved in Articulate360 - something went wrong. Audio AND slide shouldn't stop at all when tab is switched!
IF someone wants availability to allow users STOP/PAUSE the course, he/she can enable a seekbar with pause button. In any other case, it's a problem for course developer, because without editing the storyline app.min.js you cannot solve that problem (it has something to do with onblur and onfocus javascript functions - but I myself can't fix it). And when also we have something like baselayer is paused when switching tab, but audio or video goes freely... well, that's not ok.
ANY course based on time will crash with this behaviour. No simple time-limited questions, not mentioning any advanced synchronization.
"You are welcome to share your ideas with our team here if you'd like."
Thanks Leslie for the contact, but unfortunately, I've been sharing my ideas with the team since 2012 and never heard back from them, nor even wishing to my ideas come true, so I will just pass on this idea ;)
I hope you or Ashley, as staff members, can point to them that issue as a serious issue, because the storyline output is just... faulty. And to make things clear - if they could make scripts pause audio alongside with timeline, that it's simple to not pause anything at all. They know where to search and probably they exactly now what to edit.
Hi Mateusz,
Thanks for sharing those examples. As far as feature requests go, we've recently revamped our process to help our product team prioritize, and you can read about that here. We don't typically respond to the Feature request emails, unless our team needs clarification - as you can imagine, we see a lot of emails and a lot of different ideas! But they are read by our team and organized so that we can accurately track them!
I'll pass this discussion along to our team and let them take a look at the examples you shared.
Thank you Ashley!
It's not like I'm expecting to immediately post an upgrade to Storyline (3 in my case). But if they can share a workaround like editing some output files, that would be really, really great and could save me some inconvinient talk with client :) I've seen that this problem Was reported earlier (12 months ago) and even Leslie commented on it. :)
Hi Mateusz,
Yes, we had the issue where the audio kept playing and the animations stopped if you went to another tab. It looks like the fix, stopped the audio and animations in HTML5, whereas in Flash it showed the audio stopped and the animations continued. It's not what I'd expect either (as Flash and HTML5 should match) so I'm going to file a new issue with my team to take a look.
I honestly could talk myself in circles for what *should* happen - but I agree that the audio/animations should be in sync...either stopped or continuous while on another tab/window and it should be the same for HTML5/Flash.
I'd love to have your .story file as well to include in that report, if you can share. If you need to share privately you can also upload it to me here.
I would also like to be notified once the program is doing either of the same function. I don't care which, it should just either stop or keep playing both media.
"I honestly could talk myself in circles for what *should* happen"
Ashley, I'm sorry, but not at all :) When you open youtube video and switch tab - does it stop? When you open mobile game or multiplayer and you switch tab/window - does it stop? When you run podcast on some site and you switch tab - does it stop?
Story file is basics of all, but here it goes
Have a nice day
That's the beauty of Storyline - you could use it for so many things. When I saw your timer I assume you want to move the user forward throughout the course, and if they're not paying attention on a slide because they've opened a new tab I'd say keep the time and music going!
On the flip side of that, as you shared a Youtube video would stop (not just the audio, but a whole video) and that's expected. So a few different use cases here.
Either way, I agree that HTML5 and Flash should match, and that the audio and slide elements should be in sync. So if one stops, they both stop. That's why I wanted to get all the information possible into the hands of my team - they're the best equipped to figure out next steps.
Thanks for sharing the file.
Hi all,
Thanks for your patience while we took a look at this! Our team implemented an additional fix in the latest update to help with the continued issue where an animation continues to play in HTML5 when navigating away from the browser tab.
Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for each application (in this case Storyline). Details here.
Great news! We just released Update 3 for Storyline 3. This includes quite a few important fixes and some new features as well. Check out all the details in the release notes here.
The item you'll be interested in is:
Audio continued to play in HTML5 output when switching to another browser tab, causing animations to become unsynchronized.
Be sure to download and install the latest version of Storyline 3.
Let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.
Well, at least it's consistent.
Now I just need to find a code responsible for stopping playback when switching tabs, and make it NOT stopping it, so I can have time-limited questions! ;)
PS Leslie or Ashley, you are doing a great work here and there on the forums, answering like every question asked and trying to help, like rest of the staff, but have you ever considered to delegate someone from developers to aid some of us who have more complicated issues? Now the html5 course output is basically some html, some css, and plenty of js. And all of these files can be edited after publishing course, so it's way more flexible than it used to be with flash output. However, based on my observation on forums, you (I mean, the whole staff :)) sometimes answer with "We are sorry, it's not possible, please submit feature request" and then some user pops in and says "edit the file X and Y like this and it would work", and it works. Having someone from devs here to answer those more custom questions would be a huge addition to community. But that's merely just a humble suggestion from user, who constantly wants his courses better and better. I always try to share with other users some hacks I've found myself, but there's still plenty to discover.
Have a nice day!
Hi Matthew again today :)
As for the modyfing output - yes, of course I know there is no support for this. And I didn't except anyone to give us full support for this changes. My suggestion was more like "hey, can you check, if someone can sometimes pop to give general tip, where you can search to achieve desired effect" :) Like you replied to my post about background audio playing - someone from staff could write "hey, that's not officialy supported, but you can try to edit story.html and paste there some audio tag and experiment". Also, concering this particular topic - some dev could pop and write "hey, try to look in file .js for function(stopcourse), maybe you'll be succesful" :)
"Regarding the behaviour of video and audio pausing when switching tabs, I believe this is something that is typically controlled by the browser." Probably yes, but... before update we had a problem that audio was playing when tab had been switched. After update, audio is not playing. So, in this case, what controls behaviour? :)
Also, all that stuff about timers, I don't think it applies to storyline output content at all. Browser doesn't stop javascript timers, you can check at this fiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/wr1ua0db/17/
so, it's purely dependant on site, not on browser (didn't check safari tho).
And once again - I highly appreciate the work staff is doing! I see in other threads that they are helping everyone :) I'm maybe a bit frustrated, because sometimes I came with something brilliant ;) in my mind for a new training and storyline is bottleneck :(
And concerning this topic particular again - well, to be honest, there is still some inconsistency. :) it will pause audio, video, it will pause the timeline. But as I'm writing this post, I made dummy quiz with results slide and option "end quiz after 5 minutes". And it sits in another tab of my chrome. And, well, audio has stopped, timeline has stopped, but quiz time moves on :)))))) So, at all, Storyline agrees with me - time should move on when you have quiz opened on another tab :)
Am wondering if there have been any updates on this - I want a user to be able to go to a different tab but still have their courses PLAY, NOT STOP when they leave the tab. This should be the choice of the designer when publishing the courses shouldn't it? All other content on my lMS continues to play if you move away from it, but the courses I create in storyline do not. People can't always be stuck in their browers, sometimes they need to continue to do work and just want to hear the audio while they are doing it. Please help!
Hi Susan,
I see where you reached out in this conversation as well.
You've shared a great use case and I've filed a feature request on your behalf.
Hi, does the latest Storyline 360 update fix this or similar issue? When running eLearning published from last month's update the video's keep playing when in other web browser or open a new web tab however the seekbar pauses, so when the learner returns to the eLearning there is a video / seekbar mismatch.