"Duration" from meta.xml after export. Where does it come from?
Nov 13, 2013
When I export a presentation out of Presenter 13 (or Storyline) one of the files generated is meta.xml. In that file I can find some attributes of the <project> tag. Here are examples from different exports:
duration="About 2 minutes" totalaudio="0" totalvideo="118910"
duration="About 10 minutes" totalaudio="480569" totalvideo="0"
duration="About 8 minutes" totalaudio="173143" totalvideo="290640"
Can anyone tell me where that "About X minutes" comes from? I'm assuming it's calculated somehow based on all the parts and pieces of the presentation, but it seems like it could get quite complicated, especially if there are embedded quizzes, user interactions, etc.
The totalaudio and totalvideo numbers don't seem to correspond all that well so the "duration" is the one I'd like to rely upon, if I can.
If the presentation is longer than an hour, would it say "About 70 minutes" or something like "About 1 hour 10 minutes" ? If it was less than a minute, would it say "About 30 seconds" or "About .5 minutes" ?
Thanks for any information you can provide. This is a wonderfully useful piece of information but I need to know what forms it can take before I start thinking about extracting it for display purposes.
-KevinB
2 Replies
Hi Kevin,
I don't believe that this ("extracting for display purposes) is the type of thing that we support. If you wish to display the time in Studio, you can set it up to do so in the player properties:
In Storyline, you can see the estimated time (you are correct that it can be hard to calculate with all of the interactions and such), by clicking the ... to the right of the title. This will show you the data that is calculated.
I hope this helps!
Mike
Mike,
Thanks for the reply. Your solution pointed me in the right direction, for Storyline, anyway. If you change the "Duration" from "Calculate Automatically" to "Custom" you can put whatever you want (to replace "About X minutes").
And then that value is what appears in meta.xml for "duration." In my case I always put in an integer number of seconds and then I can extract that XML node and display however I want - in my case I enter "143" and then I can do the calculations to display that as "00:02:23"
This way my customers can know how long the presentation should take based on a value that I enter.
-Kevin
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