Storyline 3 Bug - White videos published as grey

May 15, 2017

Hi all,

 I have found what I believe to be a bug in SL3. I have several videos with a white background, however when published from SL3 any white displays as gray. If I publish the videos from SL2 the videos display normally with white. If I open the video file from the published course files and watch it in a player like VLC or WMP then the videos appear normal.

 I have attached a screenshot showing the issue. As you can see in the preview the white is grey but in the video file (this video file is from the published files) the white displays normally as white.

  Has anyone had this issue or found a way around it?

81 Replies
Jamie Sharple

Having the same issue, when I upgraded the course to Storyline 360 the video shows up as grey in the preview and all versions of the published output. I'm trying out 360 as a trial but this bug is going to destroy a massive chunk of my courses, all of which have to be used on iPad in HTML5. Is there any chance this bug is going to be fixed soon?

Leslie McKerchie

Hello Andrew - Crystal shared a link for you to work directly with our support team so that we can continue to investigate and track this. 

I agree, it is worrisome that so many users are experiencing an issue that we cannot reproduce at this time, but more examples could always help.

Hello Jamie - I apologize, but I don't have an update to share because we have not confirmed a software issue at this time. Our team has not been able to reproduce the issue.

I would encourage you to share your .story file here as well so that we can take a look.

Anthony LEPOT

I had the same issue, after some research on the web i founded a topic explaining that in many case it is a Nvidia video card setting issue.

here is a quote from the Niente0's answer on stackoverflow.com (https://stackoverflow.com/a/30756361)

"In many cases it is a problem of nVidia drivers. NVIDIA video card users try the following:

1. open the NVIDIA Control Panel
2. under "Video" select “Adjust video color settings”
3. under "How do you make color adjustments" select “With the NVIDIA settings”
4. under "Advanced" make sure "Dynamic Range" is “Full (0-255)” not “Limited (16-235)” (“Dynamic contrast enhancement” should be unchecked) "

I did it and i don't have the grey background anymore. the problem is that you can't ask all your learners to do the same...

Matt Smith

Hey Anthony,

 You are definitely onto something. I changed my driver settings as detailed and the content became white again. Unfortunately as you pointed out; it's not exactly practical or reasonable to get learners to do this.

Although I am still confused as to why SL2 content I produce does not have this issue.

Esther Kirkland Smith

It seems to be working fine now so I won't pursue it.

I had about 5 small whiteboard style animations from goanimate with some of them going grey and others looking white. It all looked fine in preview mode. I was using internet explorer as the browser and I published it three times. On the last time the two grey animations turned back to white.

 

Paul Wijnen

Hi all,

We are also experiencing this issue with our videos. We use SL360 and HTML5 output only.
It's very unclear what is causing this, but when you disable the hardware (GPU) acceleration in your browser, IE or Chrome or Firefox, the videos will play normally. So, you might think it has something to do with that.

On the other hand, I noticed that images which can be enlarged with the built-in zoom tool, get a grey/black border around it. I give it a white border manually most of the times to get rid of that. But can this have something to do with it maybe? Because videos are also "clickable". Maybe they get also the grey border/background and causes this strange behavior in some way? Then it can have something to do with filters/CSS in the HTML coding.

I hope Articulate will find the cause of this soon!

Grtz Paul

Paul Wijnen

Hi all,

Try enabling activeX support by adding this meta tag to the "story.html" or "story_html5.html" file. For me, I needed to add it to the html5 file and to the Web Object files. My project has the HTML5 only output setting set, because we try to use HTML5 only as much as possible.

I will add further explanation soon. Plz let me know if this works for you if you alreay gave it a try!

https://get.adobe.com/nl/flashplayer/otherversions/

 

Paul Wijnen

Hi Ashly,

Even though we use HTML5 output only. It seems that flash/ActiveX is still being used on a desktop machine. I think the activeX makes use of the hardware acceleration. Your video drivers need to be set that the video player/application takes care of the colors. If all browsers have the flash plugin installed it should work fine in combination with the ActiveX meta tag added.
The opposite also worked for Chrome and Firefox (not for IE). The opposite means turnings off flash in your browser. It looks like IE handles activeX differently than Chrome or firefox.

I dont have this 100% verified yet, but I'm curious what your technical team says about this theory :).

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

HI CPAO,

Based on the discussions here it doesn't seem that we've identified what the issue is yet. I know a few folks mentioned disabling the hardware acceleration on their end resolved the issue. Have you been able to look into that?

If you'd like, we're also happy to take a look at your course and that may shed a bit more light on what's happening. You can upload it here using the Add attachment button at the bottom of the reply window. 

Paul Wijnen

Hi Ashley and support team,

I dont think the reason/cause is Storyline. I think it is an Nvidia videocard problem.
Because, as an example, this grey issue is also showing up on this website AND only on systems which have an Nvidia graphics card.

https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/graphics/videoformatsupport/default.html

I did send Nvidia system profiles of 5 of our workstations which have an Nvidia card and which have this this issue when viewing online videos.
So, Nvidia is also looking into this right now. Will inform you when something usefull comes out of this.

Paul

 

Matt Smith

Hi Paul,

 Not saying you are wrong but I am unsure that is the whole story. I think there is likely multiple factors at work here. The reason for this is that for me and my colleagues at least, publishing from SL2 instead of SL3 works fine and white videos display correctly. However the same video published in SL3 will be grey.

Regards,

  Matt

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks Paul for sharing that and please keep us posted. 

Matt, Storyline 2 will behave a bit differently than Storyline 3, as we rewrote the publishing engine for Storyline 3 (and 360) to accommodate the broader HTML5 output. 

It's not something our team has been able to replicate, but if you're following along with this discussion we'd love to look at your files to see if that's the missing piece. You can always share them privately with our team here, or drop the .story file into a reply using the Add Attachment button. 

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