Videos freezing randomly

Hi,

This page refers to fixing videos that do not progressively stream/play properly.
Might be worth a shot.

https://articulate.com/support/article/mp4-movie-doesnt-begin-playing-until-it-has-fully-downloaded

I hope that helps.
Russ

After a lot of investigation here we think we may have isolated the problem.  Our Checkpoint firewall may have been causing issues when we were publishing courses that caused the videos to pause/freeze in random spots.  We had several people publish the same articulate file and the individuals that had checkpioint enstalled on their computer had issues while others did not.

It seems to have fixed the problem for now.  However, we still find that videos jump a little at the beginning when they are loading to play.  Not sure if this could be something that Articulate can solve in the future to make the loading and initial play of videos smoother.  Is anyone else experiencing this?

I'm glad that you were able to isolate the issue, Fern. I appreciate you popping back in with an update.

We'd be happy to look at the video issue you are experiencing. Please share your project file with our support engineers here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

After export I found that some videos were freezing in Chrome and Edge, but not Firefox. After setting the video compression from automatic to none, this has solved the issue. As mentioned in this thread, https://handbrake.fr/ is a great open source tool to use to minimize file size.

Hi, Leah. Welcome to the community!

I'd be happy to work closely with you to find out why both videos are freezing. A few questions to help us narrow down the cause:

• What version of Chrome are you and your team using? An easy way to grab this detail is to go to http://supportally.com/ 
• Is the Video Compression feature enabled or disabled on both MP4 videos? If it's turned off, Storyline will publish what's given with no maximum bitrate. If it's turned on, the maximum will vary per video since Storyline will handle the compression.

• Would you be able to share your .story file with me here? Feel free to add the project as a comment by using the Add Attachment button in your reply or send it privately via this link. I'll test in another LMS environment and let you know what I find!

I'll be here!

Hi Katie,

Thanks for responding.

The version of Chrome is: Version 71.0.3578.98 (Official Build) (64-bit)

The compression is set to Automatic for both videos. Perhaps we should try changing that?

I've shared the .story file privately via the link you provided.

Thanks!

~Leah

Good morning, Leah.

Thanks for sharing your file with me! I've replied in the case. Also, a great tip from Russell there on what to do when an MP4 file takes a while to play.

Thx for your help Katie. Leah works on my team and I think she just provided the source mp4 video files also. To give you a sense of our audience, this LMS course will be going out to over 30, 000 staff which we have done before in our LMS system ( SABA) with other courses so we want to solve this freeze issue before we deploy. 

Hi there, Brian. Thanks for this handy insight, and confirming receipt of both .MP4 files!

To keep you in the loop, I've enlisted the help of our Support Engineers so we can do a deep dive here. I'll follow the case along to share any relevant insight here – and let me know if I can help add your contact to the follow-up emails. 😊

Katie,

We met with the SABA content consultant to look at the video freezing issue with Google Chrome. The Sl360 settings look good and the mp4 files we use in the SL360 are at the lowest compression for decent video quality so he thinks the issue may be with hardware acceleration in Chrome ( http://www.tomsguide.com/answers/id-2618854/google-chrome-freezing-playing-youtube-videos.html)  

That browser adjustment didn't fix the issue and we are evaluating the embedded video option ( hosted either on Vimeo or Warpwire) in the SL360 project but that present issues with video quality and control.

Is it worth building and publishing this content in Storyline2 vs 360 to see if a "old fashioned" project works better? We haven't encountered this issue before across our 1000+ courses..now this one has a longer mp4 video than most but not the longest or largest . Those longer/larger mp4 files were published in SL2.