IMPORTANT! - a fix if you have a PLAY button appearing at start of courses

Hello, 

I found this post after creating my own, but maybe somebody can relate over here as well. 

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/issues-with-video-in-360#reply-547514

I've been testing it as you both suggested and still have issues. On the first slide I've placed a PNG of the first frame of my MP4, made the timeline as short as possible and set it to jump to next scene when timeline ends. On the second slide I've placed the video and when timeline ends it jumps to the third slide with an transition. 

Now exported it to review 360 and to scormcloud. On both platforms the scorm is unreliable. Sometimes it plays properly but most of the times (especially after revisiting is refreshing) when arriving the second slide it shows the first frame of the video but does not start to play. The seekbar however does run and at the end of the timeline it starts the transition and proceeds as normal. Very weird. This occurs on my laptop as on the laptop from my colleague as well. Any suggestions? O and by the way the video is a 8sec. Intro of 500KB so filesize can't be the issue. 

Hi all,

Thanks for your patience while our team investigated this issue. We've determined that videos not autoplaying on any slide without a previous user interaction is the expected behavior in Chrome and Safari based on their changes to media autoplay policies. 

This article is updated to reflect that and some ideas shared there to work around this browser limitation. 

and yet, every time I go to CNET to read an article, they seem to have found a way to get around this!

So what this also means is that any Storyline course we have already published and posted online has to conform to this (by any non-conforming slides being edited, and then the entire thing republished and reposted/replaced) or it stops working correctly.

This is broken then because I never want to watch the autoplay videos at CNET!

Reading up on the MEI is probably a good idea: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit#

Hi Luke,

Thanks for letting us know what you're running into with your project? Since you updated, you've republished your Storyline file as well?

The latest update for Storyline 2 is Build 1804.2716 and this explains what you can expect to see in your courses.

With your permission, I'd like to take a look at your project file to investigate what's happening. You can share it publicly here, or send it to me privately by uploading it here. I'll delete it when I'm done troubleshooting.

Will Articulate be releasing an update that allows the developer to turn off the ugly "play button" without having a crazy workaround of adding a blank slide?

Users should have an option of adding it or not, and it should never "automatically" add it (especially since the button is ugly, isn't symetrical or centered and many of us have created "start buttons" of our own already to fix the issue and not have "two buttons".

Please advise.

Hi Jonathon,

The play button was added to handle the autoplay changes made by browsers such as Chrome and Safari. Unless there are changes to how those and other modern browsers handle the autoplay of media, we won't be removing the play button.

After a while, learners may stop seeing the play button as Chrome's Media Engagement Index (MEI) learns that they allowed audio to play on previous visits to the same site. When that happens, audio will automatically play as it did in earlier versions of Chrome. 

Wondering what is the latest on this thread. My screen is black with the play button, but why can't it be the slide showing with the play button? I just have a big black screen in SL block in Rise until the learner clicks the play button.