Visibly poorer quality of embedded videos in SL3 in comparison to SL360

Hi Alexandra,

This thread discussed the poor quality video in SL3, it may cover what you are looking for.

Below is the summary of workarounds on having a high quality video in SL3.

• Use videos that don't need to be resized
• Adjust the compression settings in Storyline
• Lock the Storyline Player at optimal size

You may check the detailed best practices here.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Khrystal

Hi Alexandra,

So sorry to hear that you're coming across embedding video quality issues. This is a unique situation that I haven't come across.

Would you mind sharing your Storyline 3 file with one of our support engineers so that we may test publishing it in both SL3 and SL360 to compare and troubleshoot? We'll delete when we're done troubleshooting.

Hi Khrystal, 

Thanks for the tips, but they apply to videos, directly added to the course. I was having trouble with videos uploaded to YouTube and added via embed code. 

Hi Ren! 

We already found a solution: turning the project size up to 1280x720 pixels. This way the videos scale properly and the quality is as good as the original. Same applies if we turn the size up to 880x495. Smaller project sizes though, like 720x405, fail to adjust the video and the quality drops dramatically. This is NOT the case with sl360, only sl3. Maybe its a good idea to look into this. 

Hi Alexandra,

Great call to scale the story size to the video size! It's definitely a best practice for inserting videos, but glad it was helpful in this situation for embedding in SL3. 

I'd like to do some more digging to figure out what could be the issue. Is your embedded video public? Do you mind sharing the link?

Hi Ren,

Unfortunately our videos are not public. Although, I don't think this has to do with the embed code. I didn't change the embed codes, just the project size.

The thing is that a 720:405 size project in SL360 would display the same videos perfectly and a 720:405 SL3 project with the same videos would distort the quality. This means that the issue is with the SL3 player, as all other factors remain the same. 

Thanks for the details, Alex.

I'd be happy to take a look and do some additional testing with a sample video.

One additional question:

• What is the size of your embedded video?

Hi Leslie,

Unfortunately, I didn't keep the original project  -  I only have the resized one. Maybe you can try experimenting with a blank project and a random YouTube embed to see what happens as sizes change. Our original embed code was sizes 880x495, we tried it on project sizes 720x405 and 880x495 - same poor quality. When we reduced the embed size to 720x405, the quality did not improve. Once we increased the project size to 1280x720, it seems like the embed somehow adjusted to the new size and started displaying properly. 

Thanks for the information, Alexandra.

I took a look at a video with similar sizing in both SL3 and SL360 with the same slide size and did not notice any difference in quality.

Storyline 3

Storyline 360

Let me know if you run into this issue again and I'd be happy to take a look.

Hi Leslie,

Here's a link to one of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19DYZ7Oc1rE. Let me know if it's visible. 

I also attached the project I'm currently working on. I tried to embed the same video to this course and the quality was far from perfect. If you can tell what I'm getting wrong, that would be really great, as I want to avoid resizing a whole finished project.

Thanks in advance! 

Hi again, Leslie. I now realize that maybe you have chosen the Lock to optimal size option when publishing and that doesn't work for me. Can you maybe try testing it with the Fill browser window option and let me know what the result is? 

Hi Alexandra,

I did not see any embedded videos in your file upon first glance, so I added this video to Slide 2 and published Scene 1. 

Do you notice any quality issues when taking a look at my published output here? It looks similar to the link to the YouTube video for me when viewing in Chrome 77.

If you do notice a difference, please let me know what browser you are viewing the content in.

I adjusted the dimensions of the embedded video to match the slide:

Hi Leslie,

I didn't add the video on purpose: I wanted to see whether you will get different results when you embed it. When I publish your file on my computer, I see the same quality output as the one you have posted. 

What settings did you use? And did you adjust the size of the video in the slide or in the embed code, or both? 

Awesome, Alexandra.

I adjusted it in the embed code when uploading.

Let me know if that method works well for you. 

How were you adjusting the videos previously?

Initially nothing. Just opened my project (created in SL360) in SL3 and noticed something weird about the videos. That's when I started experimenting with the size of the videos and the project as well as the publishing settings. I adjusted the video both by changing the embed code and the embedded video size. I assume this was a bug with SL3 and was resolved with the last update. 

Thanks for sharing those details with me, Alexandra.

Is it working as expected for you now?

Yes, fortunately for now it is. I hope it stays this way. :)