Video Playing Issue

May 09, 2012

I have an flv video that I've added to my story and I have it set to automatically play when the slide loads. It works fine when I preview. However, when I publish it out and open the story.html file, it is very spotty. Sometimes the video plays and other times the video doesn't load at all.

Any thoughts on this? Would it be better to use a different video format?

15 Replies
Nate V

I'm encountering the same issue. 

I have created a small sample video to even test to make sure, and it's definitely an issue loading the video segment of the story while being stored on a network drive. Before I go into the network part, both the story.html and the story_html5.html work fine when the output folder is on my pc and I open them from there. Not the same when on a network.

What I have is a simple walkthrough video that starts with an intro slide animation text, goes into the screencast, then closes with one of our short video files that says "thanks for watching." Nothing super fancy. So really two video files total.

When I publish the story, I copy the output to a network drive labeled with name of the drive and have a link that takes them to the html5 version. However when I click the link and it loads, the first intro with the welcome animated text works fine, but will not load the video screencast portion.

Now, if I go into the file folder in the network and click the html5 icon to open it directly, it will show video fine, but the story.html file will not show video when opened directly. I also noticed that when I click on the files directly in their output folder, it takes me to the network site but start the network address with a 'file://". This is not there when I go to my network and use the link I created.

Sorry if that makes zero sense, but long story short, there is an issue loading videos when hosted on a network.

Nate

Jamie Morgan

Yeah - it's an issue but it's good to know that it's not a problem with the course itself. Just something that you'll want to make sure you document if you have other users who will be working with Storyline.

The other thing to note is that if you're in an organization that requires SME or Compliance reviews, you'll likely want to load the course onto a server and have them view it there versus from a network drive to avoid the video issue. In addition, if you have any advanced programming in the course (external links, javascript, etc), they'll likely get a security warning when trying to launch it from a network drive. This is due to the Flash settings on their PC. If they don't alter their Flash settings, then that advanced functionality will not work either because the Flash settings will block it.

For example, I had links to externally hosted job aids within my course. When my SMEs went to test it, none of the links worked because their Flash settings did not "trust" the network folder it was located in. It was a learning curve for me because all the links worked fine when I played the story.html file (but I had already added the network folder as a trusted site).

Again, just some pointers to help you out. 

Ursula Comeau

I'm running into a similar issue - we record some of our meetings and Lunch n' Learn sessions with GoToMeeting and Camtasia, and in the past, we used to just publish these files as AVI and place them on our network drive so that everyone in our department had access.

We now have Storyline (yay!), and as we have more remote employees now than we did in the past, I'm trying to use Storyline to make sharing these videos easier - both from a viewing perspective as well as size and playability.

The Storyline story itself begins without any issues, but the mp4 video (it's about an hour long) only plays sometimes. I've been it play after a delay of 15 seconds, and I've seen it sit there and not play at all, which is not good as I need this to be a reliable solution. I can't choose the CD publishing option as most people won't had admin right to be able to open an exe file, and I'm now running into a roadblock in having to try to come up with a business case to perhaps set up an internal web server for our department.

The network drive I'm trying to use has been mapped to the Y drive on all employees' laptops/computers, so I've even just tried publishing directly to the Y drive instead of my local C drive, however, reliability in the mp4 video portion of my module is still an issue. Thoughts?

Will Findlay

It has been about 5 years since I worked in a company that used Sharepoint. Back then it was an issue trying to share something that included files that were dependent on each other, such as we do with Storyline or Presenter. I'm not sure if that feature has been made available in newer versions of Sharepoint though.

Does your company by chance have a contract with a video hosting company? For example, where I work we can upload videos to Brightcove and then we have a private link we can embed as a web object. I imagine though if you had that you would already be using it. Hmm. I think you are going to need some kind of web server, but maybe someone else can prove me wrong.

Ursula Comeau

I would love some input from one of the staff members as this is going to be a huge issue for me. The whole reason we bought Storyline was to be able to more easily share our recorded meetings and training sessions with our remote employees in different countries, and the old method was placing an AVI file on a shared drive on the network, then copy it locally, wait, wait, wait some more for the copy to complete, then watch it. With Storyline, I can make this process a lot easier, and the download won't take as long when I use the web publishing option, however, some people have been able to play it, and others haven't - so results have been unreliable. We do have an LMS so I could publish using the LMS format, but as these are not traditional learning modules, I wanted to avoid having to "enroll" people so that they can view these videos, but it looks like this might be my last option...

Can any of the Articulate staff suggest anything at all?

Thanks in advance!

Will Findlay

What if you upload the content to your LMS, and then you "steal" the URL that the LMS uses to display the content, and just send out that URL outside of the LMS? In other words, use the LMS as a mechanism to get the content to it's web server, and then go around the LMS and give people the direct URL to the content.

Depending on the LMS the user may then be able to go to the URL without logging in, or they may need to use a login. But it is worth a shot.

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