Pausing timeline when pausing a video

Aug 10, 2012

Gillian Whitney
By Gillian Whitney

I just noticed that when a video in a slide is paused the timeline keeps moving along.  It does not pause in unison with the video control pause.

I have some screencasts that I made and inserted into my project.  I added some zooms onto the slide, so that there would be some good closeups on stuff in my screencasts.  When the user stops the video, the zooms continue to display, which looks totally crazy. 

Then, when the player resumes the video, the zooms have finished playing and the user no longer has the benefit of any video closeups.

Is there a way for me to get the whole timeline to pause whenever my user clicks pause on the video controls?

Thanks,

Gillian

55 Replies
B K
over 11 years ago12/03/12 at 10:15 am (UTC)

Disabling video controls and enabling the seek bar will allow the user to skip throughout the video with timeline (animations, triggers) staying in sync.  The downside to loosing video controls is that there is no time code. 

However, even though the video controls are disabled, the video can still be paused by clicking directly on it.  Solve this problem by placing a hotspot over the video; the video will stay in sync with the timeline and disable the ability to pause the video by a click.

Hopefully within the next few updates, Articulate will include an option to sync video controls and the seek bar or include a time code in the seek bar.

John Ned
over 11 years ago12/12/12 at 12:47 pm (UTC)

Peter - can you please confirm that this is a known issue...that currently, the Storyline seekbar does not sync correctly with the video controls? This is causing us much pain on multiple projects involving mp4 video...

Thanks!

John

B K said:

This is also the case with seeking within video control.  The timeline is not in sync with the video control causing issues with timing animations in the timeline....

Peter Anderson
11 years ago02/20/13 at 8:49 am (UTC)

Hi everyone

Thanks for your attention to this. This is something that's still being discussed internally as to how we can handle it better. In the meantime, David put together a great video demonstrating how to prevent pausing a video independently of a slide and disrupting synced annotations. See if it's something that will work for you: 

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro
11 years ago02/20/13 at 1:00 pm (UTC)

Hi All,

Peter, thanks for posting this and David, thanks for the very clear instructions.

Since the discussion is around playing and pausing videos for reasons, I thought I'd add links to two other play/pause ideas I've come across in the past few months...you never know which play/pause combo will be THE right one!

Thread: Continuing a video when user clicks

This Screenr

Robyn Serum
almost 10 years ago05/01/14 at 1:31 pm (UTC)

Hi All,

It's been over a year since the last post on this thread, so I wanted to check whether there are any new features have been added that prevent the user from clicking on the video to pause it. Currently, we are using transparent objects to prevent this for every video. Is there an easier way to prevent this, yet?

Thanks,

Robyn

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
almost 10 years ago05/01/14 at 1:35 pm (UTC)

Hi Robyn,

There hasn't been such a new feature added, and if you'd like to see documentation of all the items added or fixed in each update you can find that in the release notes here.  If you'd also like to see a similar feature, I'd encourage you to also share your thoughts in the form of a feature request so that our product development team can appropriately track how many requests we receive. 

André Rodrigues
almost 10 years ago05/02/14 at 10:44 am (UTC)

I think I can help. I did it this week

You can create a layer without nothing on it an call this layer like "pause_timeline"

Than u set this layer config to pause base timeline when the layer is show.

Now, everytime u call the video player to pause, u call the layer too. :D

Here an example attached

In this example I made some buttons OUTSIDE of the stage just to call other layers and hide other layers in a specific time.

So when u reach 5 seconds of the video you will see a marker and if you click on it, it will pause the video AND the base timeline (because I call the "pause_timeline" layer)

At 10 seconds the marker desapear, at 15 seconds a new marker apear and at 20 seconds desapear again.

Rob Skeet
over 9 years ago10/10/14 at 9:00 am (UTC)

Hi folks.  We're in a bit of a pickle.

We have a suite of courses produced in Storyline 2 that have embedded video with a number of text and graphic cue points layered over top.  All of this worked great with the embedded video. however , The server that these are hosted on can't handle the amount of video through the HTTP server.  We wanted to stream the videos via Vimeo but they appear to run independently of the timeline. if you pause, the video keeps going and then you lose sync with the graphics.

We tried using youtube and it appears to work fine (If you put a transparent cover over the video so people don't click to stop it)

but I can't get the "YOUTUBE" watermark to go away which looks horrible.  We chose Vimeo because you can pay to take the logo off. there appears to be no such solution for Youtube. (You can remove it from the player which we aren't using)

I would much prefer it to work with Vimeo.  Is this a bug?  has it been documented?

Help!!!!

Rob

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 9 years ago10/13/14 at 9:43 am (UTC)

Hi Rob,

If you're streaming the videos, as a web object, there isn't a way to sync them with the timeline. You mentioned a transparent shape over a youtube video so that the user couldn't click on it to pause - have you tried that with the Vimeo version as well? It's a common method to allow the user to see the video timeline, but not be able to click on it. 

Rob Skeet
over 9 years ago10/14/14 at 7:06 am (UTC)

Sorry, the problem is that SL doesn't sync to the timeline with inserted videos from Vimeo but they do from YouTube.

yes, I can cover the video with a transparent box but it will not help as the Vimeo video keeps playing when you hit pause or scrub the seekbar.

This works fine with YouTube videos but not Vimeo.videos.

does anyone know how to remove the YouTube super from embedded YouTube videos?

(Not from the Youtube Player but from the YT video itself.)

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 9 years ago01/05/15 at 4:36 pm (UTC)

Hi all,

As mentioned before, if you're inserting the video as a web object, it's independent of the timeline and you can't pause both using the seekbar, as that will only pause the slide timeline (not the video). You may want to look at downloading the video from Vimeo and inserting it directly into your slide. 

Li-An Brown
9 years ago03/10/15 at 10:21 am (UTC)

Hi everyone,

Sorry to use this old thread but I'm having similar issues with syncing annotations with video in Storyline 2. All the annotations and animations are timed with the slide timeline to coincide with the correct timings in the video. I have successfully disabled the video control and used the covering hotspot technique shown by Peter above so the users have to use the slide timeline seek bar to navigate around if they want to recap any points in the video. 

However, the annotations only stay correctly synced if the user only wants to pause & play the video. If the users seek around on the seek bar either ahead or behind, the video correctly jumps but the annotations stay where they were! 

I wonder if this has something to do with the way I have made the annotations. They are each on separate layers which are triggered to be shown when the timeline ends on the previous layer. The problem occurs both on slide preview, and when published.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Jill McNair
9 years ago03/10/15 at 10:43 am (UTC)

Hi Li-An,

I recently built something similar to what you described in your post, and I tried everything I know, but could not get the timeline and video to sync properly if the seekbar was clicked. In exasperation, I ended up turning off the seekbar for that slide. Since there was not seekbar, I put a replay button at the end so users could replay it.   Not sure if this idea will work for you, but I thought I'd share it in case it would!

Hope it helps!

Jill

Li-An Brown
9 years ago03/10/15 at 10:53 am (UTC)

Thanks Jill! That is very helpful. If I can't find another solution then I will turn off the seek bar and make my own pause/play/replay buttons. Hopefully that should work.

I think for my next similar project I will record shorter video clips which are each associated with one slide. Then the users can navigate to the correct slide for the bit they want to recap, instead of having to re-watch the whole video.

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