I recently upgraded Flash player to version 24. Now, embedded video will not play (video or audio) when opening the project using "story". I see a white screen. The progress bar functions normally. When I use "story_html5" everything works fine. I am using Firefox. I had the IT department revert back to Flash v22, no change.
Thanks so much for reaching out here, sorry this is happening! What environment are the courses published for and where are you uploading them to and access them from? If you're viewing the course files from a local or shared drive, that may be what's causing this behavior. When you view an Articulate Storyline course on your local hard drive (or send it to someone else to view on their local hard drive), you'll encounter security restrictions from the computer, web browser, Flash Player, and network that'll cause various features of your content to fail.
You'll want to make sure the course is uploaded to the environment they're published for to ensure proper playback. For instance, if you Published for Web, you'll want to upload it to a web environment, such as Tempshare, to properly play it on the web.
If you want the course to be played locally so you don't have to upload it anywhere, you'll want to use the Publish for CD option. Once you have the published output, you can double click the Launch_Story.exe to launch the course locally.
I also wanted to share an article with you regarding local playback and Flash Player 23. If this was something that worked for you before and no longer does, the solutions in this article may resolved it so you can play them locally again! It's worth noting that we still advise to upload your course to it's intended environment, as playing locally can cause undesired results, but just wanted to give you that option as well. :)
Okay, so I got a better explanation from my IT guy. Here is the issue through his eyes.
“When I open story.html it is supposed to check if the proper prerequisites are installed (flash, browser etc) and then depending on the results it sends you to story5 file (which works when I open it manually) or to the other file which tells you that your computer isn’t ready to play it.
It does this with a script within the story.html code. For many of our users this functionality works and the script redirects to the appropriate page. However, we have some users who the script is not redirecting. We have tried different versions of IE including version 11. We have also tried with Firefox. We have tried Flash version 22, 23, 24 for each browser and no combination of these would allow the script to work correctly. It seems to check if html5 is supported and redirects accordingly, or at least is supposed to.
Here is the script I am referring to within story.html:
}
else if (g_bRedirectHTML5)
{
var strLocation = "story_html5.html";
Please let me know if you have any feedback regarding this issue.
I render my project onto my hard drive, then copy it to a network drive. I tried opening the project from the network drive and it fails to play the video.
Before trying to open the file from the network drive we make sure to map the location the files reside (on the network) to a local drive letter. Once we do that, we go into the global flash settings and Advanced tab to specify the mapped network drive letter a “Trusted” location for Flash. Tried this with the 3 previously listed flash version: 22,23,24.
Ah ok, I understand a bit better now- thanks for letting me know! If you're using this method, you'll want to make sure that you're using the option Publish for CD and having your users copy the output to their local drive before double clicking the Launch_Story.exe. This will be the publishing option compatible for local viewing, as the other options require uploading to a web or LMS environment to ensure proper playback. Running published courses directly off of a network drive has been known to cause some undesired behavior, so we do recommend making sure the Published for CD output is used from a local environment.
8 Replies
Hey there!
Thanks so much for reaching out here, sorry this is happening! What environment are the courses published for and where are you uploading them to and access them from? If you're viewing the course files from a local or shared drive, that may be what's causing this behavior. When you view an Articulate Storyline course on your local hard drive (or send it to someone else to view on their local hard drive), you'll encounter security restrictions from the computer, web browser, Flash Player, and network that'll cause various features of your content to fail.
You'll want to make sure the course is uploaded to the environment they're published for to ensure proper playback. For instance, if you Published for Web, you'll want to upload it to a web environment, such as Tempshare, to properly play it on the web.
If you want the course to be played locally so you don't have to upload it anywhere, you'll want to use the Publish for CD option. Once you have the published output, you can double click the Launch_Story.exe to launch the course locally.
Hey again!
I also wanted to share an article with you regarding local playback and Flash Player 23. If this was something that worked for you before and no longer does, the solutions in this article may resolved it so you can play them locally again! It's worth noting that we still advise to upload your course to it's intended environment, as playing locally can cause undesired results, but just wanted to give you that option as well. :)
Okay, so I got a better explanation from my IT guy. Here is the issue through his eyes.
“When I open story.html it is supposed to check if the proper prerequisites are installed (flash, browser etc) and then depending on the results it sends you to story5 file (which works when I open it manually) or to the other file which tells you that your computer isn’t ready to play it.
It does this with a script within the story.html code. For many of our users this functionality works and the script redirects to the appropriate page. However, we have some users who the script is not redirecting. We have tried different versions of IE including version 11. We have also tried with Firefox. We have tried Flash version 22, 23, 24 for each browser and no combination of these would allow the script to work correctly. It seems to check if html5 is supported and redirects accordingly, or at least is supposed to.
Here is the script I am referring to within story.html:
}
else if (g_bRedirectHTML5)
{
var strLocation = "story_html5.html";
Please let me know if you have any feedback regarding this issue.
I look forward to your reply.”
Hey there!
Thanks so much for the additional details here. Where are you uploading the entire published output to for the users to access from?
I render my project onto my hard drive, then copy it to a network drive. I tried opening the project from the network drive and it fails to play the video.
Before trying to open the file from the network drive we make sure to map the location the files reside (on the network) to a local drive letter. Once we do that, we go into the global flash settings and Advanced tab to specify the mapped network drive letter a “Trusted” location for Flash. Tried this with the 3 previously listed flash version: 22,23,24.
Ah ok, I understand a bit better now- thanks for letting me know! If you're using this method, you'll want to make sure that you're using the option Publish for CD and having your users copy the output to their local drive before double clicking the Launch_Story.exe. This will be the publishing option compatible for local viewing, as the other options require uploading to a web or LMS environment to ensure proper playback. Running published courses directly off of a network drive has been known to cause some undesired behavior, so we do recommend making sure the Published for CD output is used from a local environment.
thank you for all of your help. I really appreciate it.
Tim
My pleasure, Tim! Happy to be of assistance. Please do let me know if you have any further questions regarding this :)
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.