Storyline Course stops in Chrome

Oct 09, 2020

We have a course built in Storyline 360 that stops in the middle when played back in Chrome and Edge. It plays back fine in Internet Explorer and Edge.

We have a "template" we use for various types of projects. These usually are boilerplate slides that set up and play a single, or 2-3 videos. We have not had issues with this template - there is nothing spectacular going on except at the end where we have the user acknowledge that they've seen the video, and a little JavaScript prints the acknowledgement page for them. 

The course stops about 4:45 in the video. I'm believing at present that either there is something in the video itself that is confusing Chromium or there might be a buffering issue. Unfortunately I've trying right now to run down the Storyline file and video, because whoever built it in the development group has not uploaded it to our shared archive.

The company group researching this issue also came across the JavaScript error "could not find slide in string table". I plumbed that a little bit & having  done editing in frame.xml I understand that this is most likely a layout issue dealing with the player, and as such is a non-issue to our concerns. We also looked at the loss of jQuery underneath Articulate 360 as a possible contributor to this issue, but I could find a reason why the change of jQuery from 360 would affect video playback.

Has there been an issue with video playback in Chrome browsers? Are there links here that might help me plumb this issue?

Thanks!

9 Replies
Ren Gomez

Hi Mark,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing those details of what you're experiencing! I don't think this is a Chromium issue as the latest version of Microsoft Edge also relies on Chromium. A few questions to dig deeper:

  • How is the course being hosted? Is it published to an LMS or the web?
  • If the course is on an LMS, have you tried testing the file in a different environment such as SCORM Cloud?

Taking a look at the .story file would be incredibly helpful for testing purposes. Would it be possible to reach out to your development team and have them connect with our support engineers to share the file?

Mark Ramsey

Hi,

The course is being hosted on our LMS. I have tested it also in SCORMCloud. It reacts the same way in both environments.

Unfortunately, we don't have access to the .story file. The person that built this course did not update our archive & has left the company, and all we have right now is the published package. We do have his laptop but I believe it was ghosted before we could get to it. For that matter, the only real issue we have right now is that an audio file stops playing back, but only in Chrome. So for now we are going to recommend that our users view in Internet Explorer, where it does work correctly. This course is due for an update, probably in December, so in the meantime we'll just handle it like this.

I did find out in the meantime that we have a service agreement with you, so if I run into a sticky wicket I'll be back. I've managed to fix two out of three issues in the last week by using common sense and using processes of elimination.

Thanks,

Mark Ramsey
Media Production Specialist
616-802-1125 (Direct) 400-1125 (Internal)
269-908-9726 (Mobile) 616-776-3690 (Fax)
mramsey@bdo.com

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Albert Unrath

I am new to Articulate, but I am confident I am having the same issue as Mark.  Constructed online "game", output is HTML5.  It is running on a web server.  When it initially launches from the URL it plays in all browsers, but if you leave and return to the game the page does not load in Chrome and Edge.   We have tracked it down to an open string.  The issue seems to be related to the key, something with "5uLAN2Ksmpp" placed on the local machine... looks like for tracking.  I am using variables to keep a running score for the participant, but I can't determine if that is the issue or not.  Bottom line...  I need to figure out how to fix this issue quickly.  Can't roll out to the campus if it doesn't play in our primary browsers.  Thank you for your help. - AL

Jose Tansengco

Hi Michelle, 

Sorry to hear that you ran into a similar behavior. I'd like to ask a few questions to help clarify your experience: 

  • Does the video still stop when you view your course using Chrome's incognito mode? 
  • Do you have the latest available version of Google Chrome installed? As per checking, the most recent one is Version 104.0.5112.79 (Official Build) (x86_64). 
  • If you have Chrome browser extensions installed on your computer, can you try disabling them to see if this helps?
  • Are all of your videos affected, or just a few ones? 

To help test if the behavior is isolated to your video, you can download a tool called handbrake and use it to re-encode your videos

Looking forward to your response!