When Media Completes not working for video with pause

May 14, 2013

Lucas Hackett
By Lucas Hackett

I have a slide in my course in which a user clicks a series of buttons, and for each button clicked a video comes down on a separate layer, plays through till the end, and then disappears off the slide on a When Media Completes trigger.

This was working great until I attempted to add pause functionality to the slide. The buttons I added have Pause Media and Play Media actions on them. I've found that when I play the slide and pause the video, the video still disappears after the time it would have originally without pausing. So, if it's a one minute video, and I immediately pause it for twenty seconds and press play, it will play the first forty seconds and then disappear.

I have seen other posts here and there that seem to confirm this behavior is happening for others. It seems to be a bug. Has anyone found a decent workaround? Could there be any plans to fix this?

Note - this issue does NOT occur with audio.

5 Replies
Christine Hendrickson
almost 11 years ago05/15/13 at 7:38 am (UTC)

Welcome to E-Learning Heroes, Lucas!

I honestly don't believe this to be a bug, from what you're describing, but it's difficult to tell without seeing the project.

Where are your pause and play buttons? Are they set up to pause the timeline for the main layer or the layer that contains the video itself? Also, is your video layer set to pause the main timeline?

Any chance you can share the .STORY file here for the project, or even a single-slide version of the project that contains your video slide? I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can get this working the way you'd like.

Thanks and welcome again, Lucas!

Lucas Hackett
almost 11 years ago05/23/13 at 11:57 am (UTC)

It took me a while to put this together -

So, the desired behavior is -

  1. The slide starts
  2. A layer appears that pauses the base timeline when an instruction text box appears on the slide
  3. User clicks a button to play a video (user is able to pause video)
  4. Video in separate layer drops down from top
  5. Video plays to end
  6. Checkmark for video shown on base layer
  7. Video drops off bottom of slide
  8. Slide checks to see if all videos have been played
  9. If all videos have been played - pause layer is hidden, base timeline resumes. If not, back to step 3.

The first slide in the STORY file uses When Media Completes triggers to achieve this functionality. The second uses Timeline Ends slide triggers. Neither lets the video play to completion after it has been paused.

Any thoughts?

Christine Hendrickson
almost 11 years ago05/24/13 at 7:12 am (UTC)

Hi Lucas,

Thanks for sharing this!

I think I've stared at this a bit too long, but - I think I finally figured out what's happening here. I don't believe it's an issue with the trigger or the videos. It looks like this is happening because of the video layer timeline. 

For example, if I watch 20 seconds of the video, pause it and replay it, the layer closes before the video finishes (as you've seen). However, if I extend the timeline for that layer and don't pause for too long, this is no longer an issue. 

I extended the timeline for both Video 1 and Video 2 on the first slide to 120 seconds, just for testing. You could certainly go even longer, if you think users will end up pausing for an extended period of time, or you could even make an additional pause layer that will pause the timeline of the layer.

This seems to work pretty well on my end. I play the first video, pause for about 20 seconds, resume and the video will now complete. If I do the same thing for the second video, I see the same behavior, the states now change on the main layer and the timeline for the main layer advances to show the "Hooray!" confirmation.

Can you take a look and see if this works for you, please?

Thanks!

Christine

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