What we’re doing to help you update your courses for browser auto-play settings (updated 12/06/2018)

May 15, 2018

Justin Grenier
By Justin Grenier

Recently some common browsers, including Chrome and Safari, have started blocking auto-play of audio and video content on the sites you visit. That includes audio and video in e-learning courses that are hosted online.

That means that audio or video on the first slide of a course will not automatically play. It also means that videos and audio won’t work when learners suspend a course and restart on a slide that contains audio or video. Your content won’t be affected by this issue unless videos and audio are set to play automatically.

Unfortunately there’s nothing you can do to override the browser’s settings. That’s why we released updates for Storyline 360, Studio 360, Storyline 3, and Storyline 2 to automatically detect when this occurs and present the learner with a play button overlay. That user interaction is what the browser needs in order to play the audio or video. If your courses have a required user interaction on the first slide and no media, you may not need to republish to have the media autoplay.

We’re working on a content updater for Storyline 360, Studio 360, Storyline 3, Storyline 2 and Studio '13 that’ll let you mass update all your courses. In the meantime, you’ll need to republish your courses one at a time to fix this issue.

We know this is super frustrating, and we’re so sorry for the trouble. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

UPDATE (12/06/2018): We've now created a tool that lets you mass update existing courses without republishing them. Currently, the updater works on Storyline 360, Storyline 3, Studio 360, Storyline 2, and Studio '13 courses. See this article for details!

159 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 5 years ago08/31/18 at 2:40 pm (UTC)

Hi Erich,

Correct, the fix was implemented in Build 3.17.16117.0 of Storyline 360 and Build  3.4.15731.0 of Storyline 3.

Anything published with those updates and after have this fix implemented and you'll see the play button at the start of a course to allow users to have autoplay of media. You can also reference this article for more information.  

Justin Grenier
over 5 years ago09/11/18 at 4:13 pm (UTC)

UPDATE: We've now created a tool that lets you mass update existing courses without republishing them. Currently, the updater works on Storyline 360, Storyline 3, and Studio 360 courses. See this article for details!

And soon, the updater will also work on Storyline 2 and Studio '13 courses. Stay tuned! We'll post a comment in this forum thread when Storyline 2 and Studio '13 support is ready.

Justin Grenier
over 5 years ago09/25/18 at 7:39 pm (UTC)

UPDATE: We've now created a tool that lets you mass update existing courses without republishing them. Currently, the updater works on Storyline 360, Storyline 3, Studio 360, and Storyline 2 courses. See this article for details!

And soon, the updater will also work on Studio '13 courses. Stay tuned! We'll post a comment in this forum thread when Studio '13 support is ready.

Rochelle Porter
over 5 years ago10/09/18 at 4:58 pm (UTC)

See attached for the error I am receiving. 

I have connected with my IT and HRIS/LMS administrator and we are all at 

loss. We have a ticket into Success Factors now.
We have the Articulate 360 and some Storyline 2 files saved on 5-6 local
hard drives (we do not have a team license.)

Any help is appreciated. Thanks,

Leslie McKerchie
over 5 years ago10/09/18 at 5:40 pm (UTC)

Hi Rochelle,

It looks like you may be replying via e-mail and this did not allow your error message image to populate here in the forums. 

It looks like your email signature came through though. You can remove that if needed by clicking ‘Edit’ beneath your response (click 'View' vs. 'Reply' in your e-mail). Here’s a quick Peek video if you need help.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 5 years ago10/12/18 at 4:49 pm (UTC)

Hi all,

Just a quick update, we fixed the issue in Storyline 2 where if you accessed a course that has audio on the first slide, you wouldn't hear the audio on the first slide when you play the course locally using Google Chrome Version 66.0.3359.139 (Official Build) (64-bit) or later. 

You'll want to download the latest update, or use the Articulate updater for Storyline 2 to republish your content to include that fix. 

Andy Wood
over 5 years ago10/18/18 at 3:58 pm (UTC)

I just wanted to share something with other users as a heads up. I ran the latest updater on a 3 TB hard drive where we keep our longer term file storage. While it took a while to complete, the process appeared to work fine. However, the updater did require extensive scratch space on my local hard drive. I believe it tied up 45 GB of scratch space while scanning and fixing content. Because my hard drive filled up, other applications I tried to use ran into issues.

Long story short...if you need to scan and patch a larger drive, some applications on your machine may not be available to you depending on how much free disk space you have available on your machine. 

Justin Grenier
over 5 years ago12/06/18 at 6:41 pm (UTC)

UPDATE:  Since the original release of Chrome 66 effectively broke a lot of web content, (such as e-learning courses with audio introductions), Google responded to the cries for help and delayed their policy again in October.

But this reprieve was temporary.  Google has now stopped autoplaying audio again in December 2018 with the release of Chrome 71.  And with the software updates and content updaters mentioned above, you’re ready to go!

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.