Publishing Storyline to CD

Nov 06, 2015

Hi - I read up on the steps to publishing to CD, but would appreciate help on how to PLAY the published project on a DVD.  I am guessing that, by "DVD" Articulate means a DVD drive on a computer.  There appears to be no feature whereby Storyline projects can be run on a DVD player - is that true?  Unfortunately, that is precisely what our client wants to do!

5 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hi S! As you can see in our documentation here:

  • If you burn your course to a DVD, it must be played in a computer DVD drive. It won't function in a DVD player on a TV.

It looks like you found a great thread here where David shared a suggestion.

Other options:

Record the course being taken by someone using Replay or even Storyline.

You can export screencasts as MP4 videos, or you can save individual frames as PNG images. See this tutorial for details.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi S, 

Thanks so much for sharing your published output here. We don't offer support for courses published for CD/local source to play within a standard DVD player such as you'd find as a standalone or connected to a TV. You'd need to play it from within a computer DVD drive, and depending on the set up you have you could look at mirroring that to a TV (for example I use Apple TV to regularly play things off my Mac). 

If you need to play it as a DVD in a standalone or TV player, I'd look into ways in which you could create the entire output as a video. For example if you were to preview or play the published output on your computer you could use a tool such as Replay to record it - and Replay will publish to an MP4 file which should play on a standard DVD player.

If you're still looking for additional assistance perhaps someone in the community will be able to share what they've done in regards to this set up. Best of luck with your project and if there is something else we can assist with please let us know. 

Dave Neuweiler

I have a client who asked for previously published content (Studio 13) to be converted to MP4 video. In addition, the client wanted the option to stream the video from their servers, and to distribute by DVD. I did this with Studio, Replay (and Nero Video 2014 -- $25 -- to publish the DVD).

Here's how I went about it.

First, the content has to be suitable for conversion to a video. In other words, no user interactivity. If you have interactive elements, you'll need to rework them so that they will play automatically, or eliminate them from the project.

Also, since the output will be video, you'll have to ensure that your fonts are large enough to be readable in the final output. You can experiment with those sizes (the smallest I used was 20 point).

Next, prepare the presentation to play without using the navigation buttons. All screens must auto-advance with the exception of the first screen. You'll need to be able to control that when you record with Replay.

Create a Custom Player Template. The goal is to make the viewing are as large as possible on your screen for playback. So get rid of all tabs, and the sidebar. Leave the navigation buttons; you'll need that to start the presentation. Also set the Browser to fill the screen.

When you're ready to publish,  open Quality under properties. Move all the settings to their highest value. This will make the published content larger in file size, but we don't care about that since we'll be making a video.

Publish to Web Delivery, and test the output. Once you click the Next button on the first screen, the entire presentation should play without any intervention. You'll spot anything that needs to be tweaked. One of the things I found was that for some slides, there wasn't enough of a pause for the voiceover when the slide auto-advanced.

Next, set up your browser; again the goal is to make the viewing area as large as possible. So turn off any sidebar menus or toolbars that you can.

There are a few things to check on your computer, as well. For example, you don't want the making making sounds for alerts while you record, and you don't want a screensaver to come on either. Set the speaker volume high enough so Replay will be able to record at the correct level; you may have to experiment to find the right setting for you.

Now you're ready to record in Replay. Play the published output -- it'll be paused on the first screen, and open Replay. When sizing the recording frame, make sure that you maintain an exact 4:3  aspect ratio. For my screen, this ended up being a frame size of 880x660.

All set? Click Record on Replay, and start your presentation. Only two things to remember at this point ... keep your cursor out of the recording frame, and be ready to end the recording when your presentation ends.

Once published, you'll have an MP4 video at 15 frames per second. While most video is 30 FPS, this seems to be good enough for this application.

If you need a disc playable on a DVD player, use any DVD authoring software to create the disc.  I was pleasantly surprised at the quality when playing the content on DVD to a 60" television

I hope this helps!

 

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