How to force Storyline 360 to publish videos at MP4 and not QT?

Hi Steve!  Thanks for sharing so much detail about what you're seeing when comparing your published output with different quality settings.  I'm discussing with my team how Storyline handles processing your video files and what we expect to see in the output at those different settings.  I'll keep this post updated.

To make sure I understand the main issue, your end users are seeing poor video playback when you publish at the default settings and host your course on your website.  

• Is this happening on different browsers and devices? 
• How do your videos range in file size and duration? 
• Also, where in your courses do the videos play (e.g. immediately from the beginning, not until a few slides in, throughout the course)?

Thanks for working through it with me!

Steve, one more piece that may help us... can you please share a zipped copy of your published output that contains the .mp4.qt files with me?  You can either attach it in your reply here or upload it privately here.  Thanks!

Yes it happens with all browsers we test with (Chrome, Edge, and Firefox).

Videos range in size from <1MB to >200MB but not all get converted to the .mp4.qt format and I can't figure out the pattern. One that consistently gets converted to .mp4.qt when publishing to Web as HTML5 only with Standard Quality (video quality 5) is 62MB  at high quality (video quality 9) and 40MB when published at standard quality (video quality 5). The video on the very next slide is a few MB larger and always publishes correctly as .mp4.... 

The first slide and usually first several slides are static  content intro and navigation. The slides with video follow. 

To confirm - with output format set to HTML5 Only and Quality set to 5, this problem happens if you are publishing to Web but not if you publish to LMS. If you set video quality to 9 then it always publishes correctly but the files are big.  I will send private uploads of an example project file and zip files of the output from Web and LMS.l

Thanks, Steve!  I'm testing your files now, and I'll send you an email shortly with what I find.  So far, when I open your published output folders, I'm not seeing .qt extensions on your .mp4 files.  My guess is that it has something to do with your default program to open video media, QuickTime.

No worries, though.  We're going to figure out why video playback is not performing well when you host your output online for learners!

The really interesting thing here is that the view on the right (HTML5 Only) is actually missing the other video file. Note that the view on the left has another .mp4 two rows above the one you highlighted. That file is missing on the left. I double checked the zip file I sent you, which was produced by Storyline by clicking the Zip option on the publish completion window, and the file is not in there, yet it is still in the output folder. I just manually created a zip file of the folder and the file was included. How does Storyline create the zip file?

Incidentally, if I run the project from the local folder where the .mp4.qt file is present, the video fails to play, so getting it into the zip file does not seem to be the actual solution, but perhaps it is a clue to where the problem is. I will upload the zip file that does included this file via the private upload.

I just ran another test by just renaming that video file to remove the .qt from the file extension and found that the project now functions, suggesting that the bug at hand is in that file name itself as it appears the project is looking for .mp4 and not .mp4.qt..... 

Update. It just happened again and this time I was recording the screen with Camtasia with Storyline, Task Manager, and File Explorer all open and in view. Task manager shows that encoder.exe is active when the .mp4.qt file gets created and in the File Explorer window you can see that the .mp4 file is created then .mp4.qt file is created then .mp4 is deleted, leaving behind only the .mp4.qt file. I then compare contents of the \story_content folders and you can see that the .mp4.qt was not included in the zip file.

At that point I stopped recording, but when I open story_html5.html the project gets to the slide containing that video and no video plays. If I rename the file to remove the .qt from the end of the file name I can open the project and play the video as expected.

You can watch it happen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVaqKuLRCY

Thanks, Steve.  I've escalated your case to our support engineers.  I'll follow along as well and update this discussion as needed!

Just a note that I have every problem Steve is having (at least related to this post). I had this back in March, too, and just removed the .qt from the file and it worked. But still...shouldn't need to do that.

Hi there, Shannon.  Our support engineers had a look and requested that Steve test uninstalling QuickTime from his machine and then republish his file.  I'm not sure if he was able to complete that testing.

If you have QuickTime installed, could you possibly uninstall it and see if that impacts the .qt extension being added to your media files?  You can also work one-on-one with our support team if you'd like.  Thanks!

Has there been any update on this?

I'm still having to go through and manually remove the .qt from the file names of most of the videos after I publish. This is a very painful process that I've been going through since March. It doesn't happen on every publish or to every video, and I would love to know what I could be doing differently to prevent this. (I've uninstalled quicktime and I'm still getting this extra extension and the videos won't play in the course.)

Not sure if this information is helpful, but these are my updates. 

I worked with support in March or so and discovered that uninstalling Quicktime was a fix. 

The issue came back last week. I reinstalled Quicktime, and I've gotten a few clean publishes on courses that were giving me issues. 

The issue started back on a few courses that I was doing final publishing and clean up on. In both I did some quick video trimming in SL. They were publishing fine before, but after I clipped a video in each, the QT extension started being added to random videos during each publish. I'm not sure if this was the cause, or if it was just something else that made it start back. 

Are you using Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, GDrive, or similar file sync software? We determined for us it seemed to always happen on the computers with fast internet connections but not on the computers with slow connections. Our conclusion was that with the fast connection, Dropbox was catching up to and began to sync the .mp4.qt file by the time Encoder finished processing it, which prevented Storyline from renaming it to .mp4. I think Storyline could fix it with some basic error checking to confirm that the rename worked... Lacking that, we just make a point to pause Dropbox or publish to non sync'd folders.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for sharing the reminder about working locally, as that is a part of our general recommendations and best practices for working with Storyline files. 

Traci, if you're not connected to another network or shared folder, let us know. Our Support Team would be happy to work with you one on one. 

Thanks everyone! I will see if the suggestions help. Fingers crossed!

Fixed! Thank Steve!!!

I always work off of my C drive, and generally follow best practices for file storage. But, I am also super careful to have sync software in place so that everything gets backed up. Pausing the sync was a fix!

Had the same problem, but during publishing for LMS.
Client was not able to install SCORM file on their LMS system. The message was that the files didnt exist...they did, but had the QT extension added.
I paused Dropbox, published it again,  and it seems it solved the problem.
Thanks

That's fantastic, Marcos! Glad the tips shared here were just what you needed. 😀