Does Storyline load progressively?

Thanks for the response Gerry!  Do you happen to know if there is any way to stagger it more?  Our courses are failing the bandwidth test miserably and I want to try to avoid reverting back to '09.  Thanks again for the guidance!

Hi Corey,

Did you find a resolution to this problem.  I am experiencing similar stuff.  Everything else the same, Story files take exceptionally longer to load as compared to presenter 09 files.  Actually I can see relevance to Gerry's point -

Basically after the file is loaded initially - if I navigate through the file by clicking on next button on the player after viewing the current slide completely, then it takes much less to load.  However, if I click on next button or if I navigate using the left hand menu from the current slide before it gets done completely, then I see excessive load times. 

I have submitted a case for this and am doing changes on my server as well.  But it would be interesting to see how you resolved your problem.

Thanks,

Payal

Has this been addressed?

Hi Janet, 

We don't have any updates regarding how Storyline's content loads, but if you feel your course is experiencing unusual lag, we'd be happy to take a closer look at it. Please submit a case, including your .story file, using the link below so our support team can assist you further:

http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/submit.php

Thanks!  

Agreed. I am going to have to start pulling my storyline courses. There is just way too much lag going on.

Hey Eric!

Sorry you're running into lag loading your courses. Is it happening after upgrading to Update 2 and republishing as well?

One thing you can try to rule out hosting or server issues is to try our testing site, Tempshare to see if performance is any better. May help narrow the problem.

I was curious as to how does the upgrade to update 2 (and republish) help at all with the lag thing.

Thanks,

Payal

Hi Payal, 

I'm not sure that it would Just spitballing ideas and eliminating possible issues. 

I think David may be onto something though...

Hi,

Were are having the same issue here, our Storyline courses fail the bandwidth test because it load the entire course at once. Does it do the same when running in an LMS ?

Yes.  It should load the same from a LMS.

Also, the MP3's not loading progressively was fixed in Update 3.

I'm hazarding a guess here but I suspect many (maybe most?) folks here probably like that SL courses load progressively without the need for a streaming server.

What exactly is the bandwidth test?

I'm not sure what the bandwidth test consist of, it is done by our IT department. I think they just monitor the bandwidth while running a course. They tell us when they start the course it loads a big 50MB+ chunk before clicking anything. The course is 68Mb in total (including many videos). I think they would rather see it load page by page instead than one large chunk at once. We were able to squish the course down to 30Mb by reducing the quality a little. We'll see if that passes their test.

Hello.

The way Storyline loads content is as deisgned per the article that Gerry pointed to. We will load as much of the course as possible to prevent bottlenecking of data. If we waited to load slides down the road, it could cause issues with playback. By having them download in the background while the course is playing, you are eliminating many of the issues that would be caused by waiting for heavy slides to load. 

Hi -

Ultimately to resolve our issue we had to sit down with our IT partners and go over some specifics.  For one, they were not use to seeing courses that included a significant amount of media.  They also were unaware that we had sign-off from our specific audience indicating they met certain technological criteria.  Once we reviewed this information and they had a better understanding we were able to load the courses and had few reports of issues.  The one thing I did from a course perspective was I removed the navigation options for the first five slides (which were instructions slides)  so the learners would not be able to click through them which allowed more load time.

Hi Justin,

Is there a way to modify how it loads the course so that it does not try to load everything at once?  We have some clients who have reported big impact when they first open that effectively disables all other traffic.  Obviously, there are things they can do on their end to prevent that, but with larger files it can make this a very intense download that will happen again and again depending on how often the user stops and starts.  I understand there is no other way for it to work in the iPad player.

Hi Luke!

Storyline preloads published content in a specific order to make playback of your courses as smooth as possible.  Please review this article for more information.

Thanks for the Article but my question really was about a work around that
functionality. I know what it does and why but I think there are reasons
to have a way to throttle or buffer to what content is needed during a
particular session to avoid a single user stealing all the bandwidth of a
network that was probably designed for email and basic internet browsing.
I have a project that is heavy in video that adds up to over 1.5 GB. Every
time a user opens, it downloads everything, even stuff the user does not
need or even already viewed. Obviously, the short answer is to not make a
project so big, I get that, but in the case where a large project is
unavoidable, it seems like there should be a way to at least only load
content like video (or over a certain size) when clicked. I can put a
progress bar or something to let folks with less of a connection to know
that the video is coming.

Thanks for the clarification Luke. Hopefully some community members will be able to share suggestions on what has worked for them.

I did want to share this article in case it is MP4 files that are behaving this way.

I appreciate your time. The person working on our LMS page is trying to
see if there is something we can do on our end. It might be something to
suggest in a future build.

Thanks!

Luke, I am having the same issue. Were you ever able to find a solution?

Hi Mark! I'm not sure if Luke is still subscribed, but if you do not hear from him soon, I would encourage you to reach out via the 'Contact Me' option on his profile.

Hi Mark,

The solution we ultimately landed on was the chunk our material out in a
manner where there was not so much content being loaded at one time. So,
if we have a series of videos in HD to show, we would have slides spaced
between each. This seemed to make it so that it would only try to preload
the next video and not all of them. Moving forward, we also moved to
streaming videos into a video frame within the storyline file. The stream
would come from a separate server and would completely prevent the
preloading. Since we work with a lot of international clients with limited
bandwidth, this approach ultimately saved the day.

Hope that helps.

Luke

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Thanks for popping in to share Luke!

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Thanks Leslie