Missing triggers/actions related to medias?
Aug 30, 2017
Greetings,
I'm working with a lot of audio and video files. However, I have trouble adding conditions and triggers on these files. Furthermore, the SL player's seekbar isn't very practical for mobile devices.
- I have "When Media completes" that can activate some triggers when an audio file or video file reaches its end.
- I do not have "When Media starts" which would allow me to program triggers when the user starts a video or when an audio starts playing.
- I do not have "When Media reaches" which would allow me to program triggers when a video or audio reaches a certain point of its own respective seekbar.
- I cannot program anything related to a video or audio on the base layer from a secondary layer, such as "Pause media" when the layer's timeline starts.
Let's say that I want to show a layer when a video reaches the 2:00 mark. I can't, unless I sync it with the SL player's timeline. Again, the seekbar isn't practical and I need to add more triggers so I can pause and resume the timeline accordingly to whatever action the user might take.
Let's say a user wants to skip an important video and that I have a pop-up layer to wanr him or her that s/he might miss important information, I cannot pause the video when the layer is called with a "simple trigger"; I need to use variables.
Let's say that a video's and player's seekbars are synchronized and a layer appears at the 3:00 mark. Well, if the user toggles the video's seekbar, it de-syncs with the player's, messing everything up.
Are there any plan to add even more actions/conditions related to audio and video files, such as "When Media starts", "When Media reaches", "Pause media" when [this layer]'s timeline starts, and so forth? There is "When Media completes" as a condition, so when will the rest will be available?
Thanks in advance
3 Replies
Hi JC,
Thanks for a thorough write up on other triggers you'd like to see in Storyline!
We don't have anything on our public roadmap yet about these types of triggers, but I can see how they'd make a lot of sense for you and others in the ELH community.
I'll go ahead and send this along to our product team as a feature request.
We always love to hear feedback from our customers, and we take all of these suggestions into account. In case you're wondering, here's how we manage all of the ideas we receive!
Thanks again for thinking of ways we can make Storyline better, and help you be a better course author!
I understand that it may not be a priority, but with the e-learning scene becoming more about narrating texts and presenting videos, especially on mobile devices, it feels almost "urgent" to add these kinds of triggers and actions.
I mean... there is "When media completes", but why aren't there "When media starts" and "When media reaches"? I have these conditions for the timeline (When timeline starts/reaches/end), but not for medias.
Furthermore, much like in modern video games, people are getting "sick of" the user interface breaking the experience, so not using the SL player's seekbar elevates this, yet we still don't have any control over a video's seekbar. Also, in some browsers/devices, the video's seekbar appears below the video (Microsoft Edge) and in others it overlays the video before fading out (Chrome, iPad). In the software, we also don't have many options how to display a video's controls.
Finally, users need to be constantly captivated by the content, "forcing" developpers to add more interactivity, more animations for texts, images and bullet points and more narrated content, be video or audio. However, all this added interactivity requires more control for the user. What if you need to put down the session to answer a call or simply missed a narrated passage? Yes, if everything is hard-coded in the SL player's timepline, you can go back, but like I said, the timeline has sort of become obsolete, requiring alternate options... which are missing obvious triggers and conditions.
On a sidenote, if I were to have a "Reload" button that reloads everything on a slide, I need to hard-code it using "Jump to slide" and select the slide I'm on; there isn't a "Reload slide" trigger similar to how you have a "Restart course".
I really hope that SL will add more triggers and conditions related to medias...
Thank you for submitting your feature request and sharing your thoughts JC :)
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