Embedded YouTube video not playing in HTML5 - Storyline 2

Dec 19, 2018

Hello,

We are encountering an issue whereby a YouTube video that is embedded on a slide will not play in HTML5 consistently on iOS devices. The video also was failing on my PC's Chrome browser in HTML5. The course has a second video that works just fine. I've checked the syntax and that's fine. I can test the link from within Storyline on my PC and that works fine. 

We tried deleting the original slide and putting the web object on a new slide and republished.  This apparently fixed the issue with Chrome and HTML5 on my PC. The video displays fine. But, when we promote the course to our Production servers, it continues to work fine on desktop computers, but still fails on iOS devices.

Because we cannot test iOS devices on our internal network in the STAGE environment, I uploaded the course to SCORM Cloud and tested. iOS devices display the video just fine in Safari, Chrome and Firefox. 

But, when we upload the course to our production LMS and attempt the course with an iOS device, it fails again with the following error (which isn't much help): "An error occurred. Please try again later. (Playback ID: xxxxx)".  The ID changes every time we get the error. We can skip through the course to the second video and that one works just fine.

So, it appears we have our smoking gun. Something in our LMS is preventing one embedded video from playing but allows another to play. 

Has anyone heard of this behavior before? Or have a quick fix? 

Thanks in advance!

 

3 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hey Richard,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing such a thorough description of what you are seeing. Switching to a web object was a good move as that is what we advise here.

I appreciate you letting me know that it's working as expected in SCORM Cloud, but it is odd that it's only on iOS devices.

A far stretch, but I know users had issues with YouTube videos in Storyline 2 when they used http instead of https.

Also, are you viewing in Safari (iOS 7 or later) or using the Articulate Mobile Player?

I hope if anyone has any experience to share, they will pop in to help you out as well.

Richard Ekparian

Thanks for the reply. 

Yes, it's very odd. I'd been perusing the boards and saw the suggestions that you mention.  We're definitely using https://, We're testing with an iPhone that has the latest and greatest iOS and an iPad Mini with iOS 9.3.5. And I just got a report that the course failed for a user with a Mac. Very odd. We do not use the Articulate Mobile Player (no TinCan). On the iPhone and iPad, we have tried Safari, Chrome and Puffin browsers. (The Puffin browser apparently can use Flash from a remote server to display the course, but, for whatever reason, it would start the course in the middle. It never did ask to 'resume'.)  My next step at this point is to mock up a dummy course with the same content and see what happens. 

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