Forum Discussion
How to show time/duration on seekbar
Hi,
I got a question from a client - is it possible to have the time remaining / duration / length show either on the built in Seekbar, or a way to custom make a seekbar that does that? In this case, the student is watching an embedding video, if the video is 10 minutes long, is there a way to show after 2 minutes have passed and 8 remaining, etc? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Stephanie
37 Replies
Just for the sake of offering complete information, if you have a slide that is 100% video, the slide timeline IS the video timeline. I assume that by 100% video you mean the video starts when the slide timeline starts, and the slide timeline ends when the video completes. In that case, not adding video control seekbar means the slide seekbar controls everything on the slide, including the video. The only thing that can go wrong is if the learner clicks on the video and stops it. You can easily prevent this by covering the video with a completely transparent, filled shape that intercepts those clicks before they reach the video.
I realize this may not be 100% exactly what you want, but after reading the forum for a while, I have come to understand that what may be a perfect solution for part of the community can be a problem for other parts. Articulate’s solution is to aim for the middle.
Walt, everything you said is correct, but beside the point. The issue being discussed here is that the player/Seekbar timeline cannot display elapsed/total time in the same way that the video controls can. Using both would be clunky. Using only the video controls would sacrifice the additional functions the player seekbar offers. Plus, it looks outdated and you have to shrink the video size to fit the video controls on screen, which creates a letterbox effect.
Displaying elapsed/total time pretty straightforward feature that anyone who uses video in their training might expect. It could also be added as a feature that can be toggled before publishing (as are CC, Accessibility Controls, etc.).
I completely agree.
I find this forum to be paradoxical in that the Articulate representatives are very polite and typically try to be helpful.
and yet....
Its baffling that Articulate ignores the overwhelming, years-long requests to build a feature that ANY half-competent Learning Experience Designer can understand is a NECESSARY feature for any modern learning UX.
And not just ignores, but pretends not to understand why it is even requested, or makes ridiculous claims about development priorities, which fall apart when it drags on for YEARS.
My guess as to why? The code-base of the app just isn't written properly in such a way that it could be enhanced in this way. And companies will ALWAYS give disengenuous answers and borderline-gaslight their customers so they can continue to milk their aging code-bases rather than do the hard work of actually fixing foundational issues. Its the reason I left Captivate for Storyline in the first place.
But guess what? Even the Adobe development team has figured out how to add a time counter to a playbar. And for both PC AND Mac platform.
This is exhausting. Clearly, they understand why we want this, and they know that it SHOULD have been a feature from version 1.0.1 onward. They just don't WANT to add it, for a reason that only makes sense to them.
Wow, I've spent way too much time searching for how to make the time lapsed/total time show up on my SL courses and thought I finally found it when I saw that this thread started 8 years ago... surely this ends with the answer! Nope. It didn't occur to me that it's not a thing... such a basic piece - and not just for videos but for every single slide since we often build them with multiple pieces of video and audio. We are moving away from building courses using SL unless absolutely necessary since we can get the time feature if we just upload videos on our LMS.
Hi Olga, the June 21, 2022 update (Build 3.65.28121.0) has new video controls. It now shows the video time lapsed and total time. Here is a link to the "What's New" page. https://articulate.com/support/article/Articulate-Storyline-360-Version-History#build_3.65.28121.0
Thanks for the response, but I can't find information there on how to display time lapsed/remaining for a slide. I see that it can be done for a video but most slides are not just one video and some have no videos at all. Can you point me to how to set that up for slides?
Hi Olga,
Have you checked out our article on how to use the elapsed time variables in your Storyline 360 project?
The article includes a sample project file, so you can check out how these can be implemented in an actual project.
Hi, Joe,
I have seen it but I don't see how that meets my need. I'm attaching a visual of what I'd like to see as part of the seekbar.
Thanks.
Hello Olga,
Thanks for sharing the screenshot. Modifying the Player seekbar to reflect the changes shown in your screenshot is currently not supported, but you can disable the player features and create your own custom navigation bar that contains references to the elapsed time variables. You can also raise a feature request directly to our product team here.
