Bandwidth Solutions - Help!

Hi, Jonathan:

I'd say that all depends on the bandwidth capacity in the classroom, so it's hard to offer advice.  First, I would ask if bandwidth is of particular concern?  Has the IT department expressed concerns about capacity?  If you're concerned about performance, I would suggest you have a conversation with the network folks (it's always a good idea to make friends with them as an elearning developer). I've actually sat down with network admins and we've done some rough benchmarking tests of courses -- even with video, Articulate scores pretty well with a small bandwidth footprint in general.  They appreciated the heads-up -- since they're tasked with managing limited network resources, they were more than happy NOT to have a surprise on course roll-out day.

If you've already established that bandwidth is a problem, though, I would suggest you republish your content with the "Optimized for web delivery" setting in the Quality tab of the publish dialog box and see what that does for you.  You're going to have to play with it and find that sweet spot between bandwidth conservation and quality degradation. 

As far as the videos are concerned, FLVs are already processed, so you'll probably want to return to the original uncompressed video files, experiment with the compression settings, and reinsert them.  Another option, if you want to get more technically advanced, is to use a preloader on your larger video files in order to improve performance during the course.

But again, if you haven't already, start by asking if any of this is even necessary: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. ;)

If bandwidth is a concern, you can always burn the course to CD's and have the users launch from there instead of local network. 

Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply, Brian!

"If you've already established that bandwidth is a problem, though, I would suggest you republish your content with the "Optimized for web delivery" setting in the Quality tab of the publish dialog box and see what that does for you.  You're going to have to play with it and find that sweet spot between bandwidth conservation and quality degradation. "

It's funny - I do play around with these settings and "publish to web" to view them on my desktop - and I notice no real difference in file size or quality - and this is video and audio. What am I doing wrong? How should I tell the difference?

Thanks for your reply, Robert!

"If bandwidth is a concern, you can always burn the course to CD's and have the users launch from there instead of local network. "

Great thuoght - but then I don't think it can speak to our LMS...

Ahhh yes! LMS is part of the equation here . Sorry.

Where is the LMS relative (network relative I mean) to the where the users will be connected?

What is the network constriction between them?

Is there some kind of caching proxy in the mix?

What other traffic will flow through that constriction at the same time?

What are the dimensions of the videos in question? What size screen are they viewed on? Is your current fidelity overkill?

MP4 videos of the same size tend to have a lot higher visual quality. Audio is not usually a large bandwidth consumer so generally I ignore it.