Level of customisation of Articulate Storylines seekbar.

Mar 10, 2016

HI all,

I hope someone is available to help/ point me in the right direction.

This subject has popped up here and there throughout the last few years and I was just wondering if there was any solid, proven theories behind using closed captions with the seekbar.

My first problem is that I need closed captions to be included with the video I have implemented within my course. If I use the "video control" seekbar to progress through the video, the closed captions (timed against the video) are not following with the users skip interaction.

However, if I use the seekbar functionality in the player settings I am able to seek through the video with the closed captionings following along perfectly.

I understand that this is because the player seekbar is directly linked to anything on the timeline bar, however the video player seekbar is only connected to that specific video.

So... All in all I am asking the world of e-learning heroes if:

1. there are any customisation effects I can apply to Articulates seekbar that allows me to move it around the slide? This would allow me to place it directly under the video (Instead of directly under the slide).

2. If there is any way at all to link the video control seekbar to the articulate player seekbar? Or absolutely anything else that might benefit my situation at all?

This is a crazy long cry for help! But if anyone has anything, it would be highly highly appreciated.

Big love,

Stu

4 Replies
Steve Flowers

Hi Stu - 

Unfortunately, it's a one or the other proposition. I've started using external video embeds as web objects. Using a tool like Camtasia or Screenflow to build your video player and captions provides the opportunity to embed the video within a web object and scale the object with the player and place anywhere on the slide.

Provided you don't need to call any overlays or slide-side synchronizations, this is a pretty good way to go. If you need to make things happen on the slide when video reaches a particular time, there are ways to use the Wistia or Vimeo API to communicate with a Javascript trigger. Same effect with the player close to the video and with built-in captions.

I find it's much easier and more portable to add captions to video using standard caption formats outside of Storyline.

Stuart Jackson

Hiya Steve,

Thanks for the helpful reply!

Using the web object through Camtasia might just fit the bill for what I am after here...

This might seem a bit of a silly question, however, will i need a constant internet connection to access the Web Object within the course, even if it is being imported locally? Again, this might come across as a silly quesiton but I just want to make sure as I will be importing the video from my PC instead of a URL.

 

Cheers again Steve,

 

Stu

Steve Flowers

Hi Stu - 

If you import a local web object, it'll bring everything into the .story file. You may experience strange behavior with web objects when running locally due to the Flash player security sandbox. 

Be sure to change the index_player.html file in the media folder to index.html and point your web object to the media/index.html file. This will let you scale the camtasia player to any size and it'll stretch to fill.

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