Forum Discussion

LeahRicker's avatar
LeahRicker
Community Member
6 years ago

Videos freezing randomly

Hi. I've been struggling with 2 videos built by a vendor that need to be included in our LMS. I created a Storyline 360 module with both videos added. They are each 30 min in length (I know that's not ideal for a number of reasons). The issue I'm having is with the videos freezing in random places. We decreased the size of the files to MP4s because the original MOVs were huge, but we're still having issues with random freezing. 

I'm wondering if it is browser related - so far, the people seeing this behavior were using Chrome.

One thing the vendor brought up is the bitrate. Does anyone know if there is a maximum recommended bitrate?

Thanks

  • I downloaded your story file and it was cutting the end for me too. Then I replaced the video with your mp4 and it worked. Sometimes video is just weird that way I guess. But glad you got it fixed!

    • PamelaRoeper's avatar
      PamelaRoeper
      Community Member

      Thank you, Russell. I was getting so frustrated. I replaced it numerous times. I even redid the slide from scratch. Nothing worked.

      The only thing that worked for me was going into Premiere Pro and re-encoding and re-rendering that little video. So, I am guessing that is where the issue was. Premiere always has its own gremlins to deal with. :-)

  • Maybe "how" you replace it matters.

    I used Edit Video > Replace Video, instead of deleting and re-adding.

    • PamelaRoeper's avatar
      PamelaRoeper
      Community Member

      No. I did try it that way as well (I am too lazy to have to adjust the position of things...  so that is a feature I like to use). As a last ditch effort I did try a whole new slide. But the only thing that worked for me was to redo in premiere pro. Maybe if I would have had more patience it would have eventually worked, but I am always on unrealistic deadlines. 

  • Hi,

    My organization facing similar issues with freezing learning content published with LMS. We have tried numerous ways of having it solved by analyzing from perspective of prepared videos, damaged SCORM packages and issues with LMS itself - for now still progressing with LMS vendor to find possible reasons of such situation. We have observed that actually we got 2 main kind of issues: corrupted video files (usually damaged audio paths) and "SOMETHING" with LMS. Once we are able to solve issues with video itsefl by re-rendering videos again, we have no idea what can be wrong with LMS. We are sure that there is something wrong with our LMS, because during process of investigation we have ruled out browsers factor (we mainly testing on Chrome, but have tried on other ones as well, btw. IE perfecty dealing with corrupted video files, so "the force is strong with this old one"), we have tested same content which randomly freezing published with scorm cloud (not our LMS) and observed no issues, so the only guilty one is our LMS. Hope that further investigation will give some results and finally allow to publish longer videos content. Maybe some of you struggled with similar LMS related issues?

  • FernMcCracken's avatar
    FernMcCracken
    Community Member

    We are experiencing the same issue.  Videos imported into articulate Storyline 360 keeps freezing randomly. This occurs only when we publish in the LMS setting.  We have ruled out that it is not an internet  or LMS issue because this occurs when we publish the files locally to our desktop. Our videos are under 2 minutes long.  If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this issue I would greatly appreciate it.

    • LaurenDuvall's avatar
      LaurenDuvall
      Staff

      Hi Fern!

      We can definitely help troubleshoot this issue! If you import the videos into a new project, do they freeze there as well?

      It's hard to determine why the videos are freezing without seeing the .story file. Do you mind sharing that with us? You can either attach it to this public discussion or privately in a support case.

  • Following this closely, as we are having very similar issues. Does not seem to affect all users. Mostly in Chrome as far as we can tell. Re-rendering the video sometimes will fix.

  • TimClark's avatar
    TimClark
    Community Member

    Not sure if this has been mentioned.

    I've been having on going issues with this freezing video bug and I'm not entirely sure its just a browser issue.

    I wanted to see if the videos were freezing before being uploaded - so I published my course to LMS, then extracted the file to my desktop so that I can view all the video content that is in the course and found that the same videos would freeze in the in the extracted file even before I uploaded them to the LMS.

    Videos can even freeze when uploaded to Review 360

    I have also found that storyline will sometimes pick videos at random to freeze and sometimes videos that were fine in earlier exports would be freezing in later exports. Deleting the slide and reimporting the video doesnt seem to work.

    I don't believe this is entirely due to file size either as I have larger videos that are fine whilst some smaller videos will freeze.

    The only way I've been able to fix this issue my self is to rexport the my videos from Premiere Pro.  As always saved to desktop, mp4, etc.

    As we are moving more into video led learning, it would be great if this issue can be resolved. :)

  • Hi Tim, 

    Thanks for reaching out! 

    Since re-exporting your videos in Premiere Pro fixes the issue for you, there's a chance that the issue might be because of the encoding process being used by your video application. One way to test this is to re-encode any affected videos using a tool called Handbrake, and then testing to see if this fixes the issue. Here's a helpful video which shows how to use Handbrake to re-encode.

    If you have any additional questions or clarifications, feel free to reach out to our support team here, and if you're willing to share a copy of your video file, we'll be glad to take a closer look at it for you!

    • TimClark's avatar
      TimClark
      Community Member

      Hi Joe, I really appreciate the quick reply!

      I have videos exported from Premiere that work perfectly fine and then one day won't export properly, I would also have videos given to me from another department, perhaps a Teams meeting screen record, which would also freeze. 

      It might be worth also noting that the videos would play perfectly fine when I preview the slide/scene/course, but only corrupt when I export either to Review 360 or LMS.

      I've noticed there's a lot of different experiences in this 3 year old thread, hopefully a more global solution can be found. :-)