Forum Discussion
Audio not playing for certain slides onwards on CHROME and EDGE
I have a storyline file that I have converted from SL1 to SL3. This is an interactive learning course and there are a LOT of audio and video [films] files in this project. The thing is that whenever I publish and test the project, the audio files in one of the scenes just won't play. The videos in that scene play just fine. This happens on CHROME and EDGE latest version. Firefox it works fine. While trying to debug, we came across some issue with the Chromium engine enforcing a limit on the number of WebMediaPlayers per frame [Stack Overflow]. Do you think you can help me out here? I tried to replace that particular scene's audio files, recreate another page but nothing works. All audio files AFTER a particular slide in a particular scene just wont be heard. I have raised a ticket as well but thought I should ask the community if anyone has come across a similar issue and knows a fix? Thanks!
Attached file shows the browser debug window snapshot.
Thought I should post my findings in case someone else comes across this issue:
Its an issue in Chromium based browsers [CHROME and EDGE] v92. Along with a host of other tools and software, it also affects elearning projects with a high number of audio/video files. No issues with versions before v92. I downgraded my Chrome browser and tested and everything ran smoothly.
Link to the Chromium community sites where the issue is being discussed:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1232649
A Project member is saying that the limit is going to be increased in the short term. In case anyone has issues with audio/video playing in projects with a large number of media [audio/video], we wait till the next version of CHROME is released to see if that fixes the issue.
Thanks Leslie! You are correct, while Google is increasing the limit of the WebMediaPlayer in an update next week, however, this will most likely not be the long term solution.
The WebMediaPlayer limit is being raised to 1000 only until Chromium determines the final limit and communicates it out. I suggest that Articulate might want to be proactive in finding out a solution, or workaround, to cut down on the number of concurrent WebMediaPlayer instances before Chromium cuts the limit down again. Otherwise, some of us will be left with broken or unplayable media again in a few months time and will be scrambling to find a solution.
My issue seems to have got resolved for CHROME new build Version 92.0.4515.131 (Official Build) (32-bit). Awaiting the new build for EDGE to test.
We are also experiencing this issue with many of our courses. This is causing many of our video and audio assets within longer courses to fail to load and playback. This is obviously a MAJOR issue. @Articulate, are you looking into an update to address this? While the problem is Chromium putting a limit on WebMediaPlayer instances, we cannot wait until they either revert or increase this limit.
It looks like either the loading of media files needs addressed, or older/unused instances of WebMediaPlayer need to be correctly removed; there is no reason that more than 75 WebMediaPlayer instances should be reached just by loading the 1st slide of a course which only has 1 video per slide. My only guess is that perhaps Storyline is creating WebMediaPlayer instances for ALL media files upon course load; if so, is there anyway to change or suppress this from happening?
UPDATE: In doing a bunch of testing, I have confirmed that SL360 creates separate WebMediaPlayer instances equal to the number of video files that exists in a published course upon startup. Therefore, since the current limit for WebMediaPlayer is 75 for desktop and 40 for mobile within Chromium right now, ANY course with more than 75 (or 40 if mobile is a concern) videos will break and exhibit this error. Attached is my dev console from my SL file test with 76 videos in the course; the same test with 75 videos does NOT trigger the error.
Hi Dan,
I appreciate you reaching out and sharing your findings and the Chromium bug that you tracked down.
Our team dug in a bit and it looks like Google may be correcting this issue in an August 3rd update.
Hi everyone,
It looks like Google corrected this issue in their latest update, Version 92.0.4515.131.
I'm not sure of the update rollout, but be sure to update Chrome when available and let us know if this resolved the issue for you as well.
Thanks for confirming, Deepa!
