Can you speed up the player in Articulate 360?

Hi,

My code that controls the speed of the video can also work with audio. Attached is a version of the code, where I changed out the JavaScript call of document.querySelectorAll('video') to document.querySelectorAll('audio') in the control buttons, and this seemed to work.

Like before, you have to sum up ALL the audio bits in the entire Storyline file, then set the variable "numberOfVideos" (I didn't change the name but you can if you want - probably "numberOfAudios" might make sense if you don't mind a little grammatical ugliness) to that summed number. For example, if you have 15 slides, all with a single audio layer, you need to set this number to 15. [It's really a constant & never changes value — Storyline doesn't allow for constants per se, nor arrays (grrrrr.)]

This isn't as nice as Matt's code using GSAP, but it does have the benefit of being a little more universal. I'm just wary of Articulate perhaps dropping GSAP like they did jQuery.

This code will still make the Seek bar fall out of sync with the audio playback, but perhaps you could use the play media triggers, and not use the player timeline. It all kind of depends if you really want to tie the audio to the slide timeline. If that's not a big deal, you could drop the Seek bar, use the Play Media trigger, and then put up an animated GIF (see attached) in the corner to inform the view that an indeterminate-length audio bit is playing back - then make it disappear  when the audio is done playing. This approach is a little less intrusive IMO if you have a long audio monolog, which we have unfortunately many times in our courses.

HTH, 

Mark

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/can-you-speed-up-the-player-in-articulate-360?page=2#reply-763242

Hi Mark,

First, thank you so much for posting your workaround. There is probably an obvious answer to this but, I am not very familiar with javascript. If I have multiple videos, say 8 slides with different videos, where in the code would I change it to 8? What exactly do I need to put in there?

Thanks again,

Laura

Thanks Mark! I think I understand. I'll try it out. 

I’m not certain why it doesn’t work in Review 360 for you. It does for us. [I just checked it again because of self-induced paranoia.]  I never publish to web — I publish to LMS or Review 360. But publishing to web is the same as to LMS except for the xml files & manifest that gets generated. If you have a SCORMCloud account, I'd upload the package there & run it, and read the logs to see if there were any errors thrown. 

I'd also just recheck to count up ALL your videos that are contained within the course file (even if they are incidental)  and set the "numberOfVideos" variable to that value. For example, we have a course template for simply putting a content video into a course, but we also have a brand video and a help video about captions that runs before we even get to the content. Adding the content video gives us 3 videos, so I set "numberOfVideos" to 3.

I can look at your code if you want.

Adding my name to the list of people that would like to see the feature added - the ability for the learner to change the play speed. 

In response to the idea of using the GSAP library to control audio or video:

I'll written to Articulate to ask them what their plans are for Greensock GSAP. [I probably will not get a response, but I had to try.] I am leery of working with a clearly licensed, third-party library that could change at any moment from either Greensock or Articulate (who knows, they might find a vulnerability & need to close it down.) However, I have delved into GSAP a little in the past week, and came up with a (similar to) "Ken Burns" slow-zoom animation effect. I see a lot of power in using this approach. If I lose this due to a change in animation libraries in the future, that won't change my layout that much. The GSAP model creates new timelines that run independent of Storyline, so my initial layout conditions won't change much.

My best advice right now is "let the user beware" & try to figure in your course's shelf life. If you think your course will last for 3 years, I think it's a good bet you can work with GSAP. Luckily HTML5 will be with us for a while & JavaScript is probably not going anywhere either. & Storyline uses Bootstrap & that's a standard. I don't think we have to worry about any large-scale Flash-conversion of courses for the next bit.

This is a little crazy that this is a feature that MANY people have requested for more than 4 years. Is there a logical reason why this feature has not been added?

Clearly it can be something that is available in the player which can be turned off and on as needed. It's evident that many, many users will enable it. We get this request from our learners all the time. 

Speeding up video or audio in Storyline with Javascript is actually quite easy. Biggest issue however is the timeline bar that isnot in sync with the updated speed of the changed values. Trying to fix this now.

Thank you for the response, Math! I read through the comments and saw that it is possible with Javascript, which I know we could implement. However, as you mentioned, I have concern with the timeline, hence all animations, captions, etc. not syncing properly at that point. We could have a button that pop ups when the user clicks to speed it up the player that explains that, I suppose. However, I just want to see it all function properly like most modern players. :)