Problems when playing video embedded in Storyline on Smart Board

May 13, 2016

Hi all,

Does anyone experience this when displaying Storyline course on Smart Board?

My company introduced Smart Board(By Smarttech.com) for training purpose which brings lots of benefits. However, we are very frustrated with playing the video(embedded in Storyline) via Smart Board. Here is the basic Story:

1. We also use Storyline to develop the courseware instead of PPT for face-to-face courses in the Smart Room. That is to say, the instructor use the Storyline based courseware to teach the class because it provides us with much more features and functionalities in this case.

2. If there is a video embedded in Storyline, the video will be very choppy and discontinuous displayed on Smart Board. (It is totally fine if we just play a standalone video via Smart Board, but when we use Storyline 2 to design the course with videos with pop-up teaching points/quizzes within the video, we cannot have the video play smoothly on Smart Board. )

3. Our IT guys tried to use VBrick (a video software) to solve the problem mentioned in the above point #2, but it is so complicated (17 steps) to have the VBrick setup each time at one location, let alone have all different locations setup each time. In this way, the video can play smoothly in the Smart Board, BUT, there is another problem, it causes around 20 secs delay between the real video and what is being shown on Smart board. The delay means while the instructor talks about one teaching point in the video, the trainees at other locations can only see what it means in 20 secs. Our instructors are very frustrated and try to avoid to use it.

In this case, we are hesitant to make good use of the Storyline and the video to better display the course in Smart Board Room just because of this technology limitation. Notice that if just play a standalone video, no problem at all on Smart Board, but if the course material is Storyline -based (with videos and pop-up teaching points and quizzes), we are very puzzled.

So, anyone in this community has ever experienced the similar problem? How are you dealing with it? Is there any better way to solve the problem? Any suggestions?

Thank you so much

4 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Phoebe,

I don't know much about the SmartBoard set up - but where is the course hosted to be played onto the board? Is it local on a computer and then streamed to the board or do you access it from a web server or LMS? You may want to confirm that you're playing it from within the intended publish environment as described here as that could be contributing to some of the inconsistencies. Also you may want to reach out to a few other users who mention Smart Boards in this thread to see if they have any ideas or expertise. 

Phoebe Lu

Hello Ashley,

Thank you for your reply, just saw your reply today! Whew!!!! The course is hosted in LMS and displayed on Smart Board by opening up the course link. I actually tried both web server and LMS to host the course, but got the same choppiness effect. While, I also posted my question to other online community and some suggested the video compression may be a big contributor to this problem, so I tried, some videos worked fine but some did not. So, most likely, video compression to a certain size may solve the problem, I still haven't figure out within which range/size the video can play without choppiness if compress the video, I will try to figure it out when encountering more cases.  but the bottom line is it should not sacrifice the resolution. :-)

Seems not too many organizations use Smart Board to deliver the courses using Storyline based courseware (with video embedded to trigger the teaching points).  

Anyways, thank you so much

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