Timeline advancing after video is paused

Jul 03, 2018

Hello,

I am working on several courses for my company, and we are inserting safety videos into each course. These are very simple courses, with an intro slide, a video slide, and a closing slide. I have restricted navigation and removed the seek bar and play/pause buttons for the video. However, users are able to click on the video when it is playing and pause the video. If you keep the video paused, the timeline continues the length of the video and proceeds to the next slide. Is there a workaround to get the timeline to pause and resume whenever the video is paused?

Pinned Reply
Eric Santos

Hello everyone, 

I have some great news to share! We released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 77, we've included important fixes and new features.

One of the enhancements we've included: 

  • Video goes out of sync with the timeline when the timeline is paused at certain points.

Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

19 Replies
Joshua Crigger

Hi Zach,

We do not have a feature for this but a workaround was discussed in this forum thread here.

A few others have submitted feature requests related to this. 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.

Hope this helps.

Andrew Hoskins

I am missing something in the explanation because I can't get the workaround to work.  I created an invisible layer that appears when the user clicks the video to pause it (I do not show the controls, so the user must click on the video itself to pause).  When the user clicks the 'invisible' box in the pause layer, it does disappear and I would expect the video and the timeline to resume, but nothing happens.  I made the 'invisible' box only mostly transparent, so I would know when it was on and off screen.

I am not given an option to 'Resume Timeline' on the base layer, which is where the video is shown.  

I would like for the user to be able to pause the  video and the timeline simultaneously and when they restart the video, the timeline begins again too.

How can this be fixed?

Andrew Hoskins

Thanks Lauren.  I appreciate the response.  Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem,.  While it did pause the video, it did not pause the timeline.  This meant that elements that I put into Articulate that are supposed to show on the screen at a specific point in the video, show up too early when someone pauses the video.  

Your video was very clear - if you could do the same thing, but with a solution to the problem listed above, I would very much appreciate the help.

Thanks,

Andy

Greg Brown

Is this still the default behavior? That videos and timeline are not connected? 

In other words, if I have a video on a slide, and other actions (like having buttons appear after the end of the video), and the user pauses the video by clicking, the timeline continues regardless? I'm surprised to find threads about this from 8 years ago, and still people are just using workarounds. Any updates? Thanks!

Lauren Connelly

Hello Greg!

Thank you for checking in! Each media has its own timeline that is different from the slide timeline. By default, the media will start at the same time as the timeline. If the media is paused, the slide timeline will continue. 

We've logged this with our team to keep track of customer impact. I'll add your comments to present to our team. I'll update you if we change this behavior to sync the slide timeline with the media timeline.

John Morgan

Hi Moses,

Thanks for checking in on this! I understand you would like an update on the sync issue after the timeline is paused. There currently hasn't been any movement on this as we prioritize other fixes. I'm going to include your voice in the request. We’ll update this discussion when there is any news to share about this.

Eric Santos

Hello everyone, 

I have some great news to share! We released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 77, we've included important fixes and new features.

One of the enhancements we've included: 

  • Video goes out of sync with the timeline when the timeline is paused at certain points.

Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

Jose Tansengco

Hi Moses, 

Happy to chime in!

The behavior you're experiencing is expected because the timeline of the video and the slide timeline are independent of each other. If you want to pause the slide timeline when you pause the video, try using the built-in "Pause Timeline" trigger with your video.

You'll want to use the "Resume Timeline" trigger to restart the slide's timeline. Alternatively, you can make the length of the video the same as the length of the timeline and use the Player's pause/play button to control the video instead. You'll want to turn off the video controls for your video so your learner doesn't get confused by seeing two ways to pause/play the video.