Storyline block autoplay in Rise

The pause timeline solution works well, even when reloading the page. Thank you so much Steve!

I had the similar issue today and I made 2 changes:

1. On the home page of the scene > slide properties on the left-hand side > Set 'When revisiting state' to 'Reset to initial state'

2. Into the Player options > Go to 'Other' in the ribbon bar at the top > Set the 'Resume on restart' option to 'Never resume'.

This seemed to work for me. 

why is it that sometimes there's the dim screen with the play button and sometimes it's not there? i tried creating my own play button but when that dim screen happens, they have to click two buttons to play the SL.

Hi Calvin,

Storyline blocks with audio or video in the first slide won't autoplay in Chrome or mobile browsers. That's when you'll see the greyed out block and play button instead. For details on which browsers allow autoplay, check out this article.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

That's not the case on my end using Chrome. My SL block is just one slide with audio that autoplays till the end. Adding it to Rise, it usually autoplays on the first visit but when i hit refresh, it will show the dim screen with the play button.

for some reason, it will also not remember the state so it will always play from the beginning when i hit refresh or when i go back to that page in Rise. The slide in SL is set to resume saved state and in the player it is set to Always resume on restart.

just did a workaround, i added a slide at the beginning with no audio and created my own play button that jumps to the next slide. it still won't resume to the last state though when i refresh the page but that's another problem. might be because i'm deploying it via web instead of lms.

Hi Calvin,

Hmm... I've never seen anything like what you're describing, so I think the best thing for you to do would be to get in touch with our Support Team so they can take a closer look. You can submit a case here.

In the meantime, if there's anything else I can do to help, please let me know!

Dear Allison,

Is it technically possible at all to set a behavior for autoplay on and off, or it is upon browser to block it? It would be great that in some cases the animation would immediately start to play sparing a click of a user, but in some cases - on the contrary.

Is it controllable at the moment of course creation and publishing as HTML5?
Thank you!

Hi, Irina! There isn't an autoplay option in the Rise 360 interface, currently.

Generally, Storyline blocks automatically play by default. Storyline blocks with audio or video in the first slide won't autoplay in the latest version of Chrome or in mobile browsers, however.

Hi,

I am struggling with the same problem. I have multiple storyline blocks in Rise with following settings in Storyline:

1st slide has trigger to pause timeline when timeline starts on this slide. It also has a custom play icon with trigger to jump to next slide when user clicks it

2nd slide onward, default trigger - jump to next slide when the timeline ends on this slide

Back in rise, we have to click on Play icon to start the timeline which works fine. The problem is that when user clicks on Second Storyline block's Play icon, the first Storyline block timeline doesn't stop playing. I have audio in slides so we hear audio from all Storyline blocks timelines.  I tried using CONTINUE block, but it doesn't solve the problem. Is there anyway I can achieve this?

Also, I have observed I lot of people are facing the same problem. Why we can't have a feature to pause the timeline when user clicks outside the storyline block or similar to multimedia blocks where one video automatically stops when we click on another video

Hi Ramraj,

I would suggest restricting the navigation in the Rise 360 lesson so the learner cannot move to the second Storyline block until the first one is complete.

You can do this by adding a "complete course" trigger on the last slide of the Storyline block, then setting the Rise 360 continue button to "complete block directly above." This article includes details of those steps.

By requiring the learner to complete the first Storyline block before moving to the second, you can be sure the audio won't overlap. Let me know if that would be an option for you!

Hello, Alyssa.

We're experiencing many of the same problems and desire some of the same solutions as described by other posters above. I'm chiming in to let you know that, and also to share what we've experienced when trying the method you suggested above.

In theory, adding a Rise 360 continue button with the "complete block directly above" setting should work. However, our experience is that the moment the Storyline block begins to play, the continue button unlocks and allows the user to continue to the next section while the audio is playing. Thus, the next Storyline block begins to play and then multiple audio files will play simultaneously. This of course provides a terrible user experience.

Please provide these solutions:

1. When "complete block directly above" is selected for a Rise 360 continue button, the button should remain locked until the Storyline block finishes playing
2. If a user leaves a lesson and returns to it, all Rise 360 continue buttons should reappear to prevent Storyline blocks from auto-playing simultaneously

Thank you for your reply, but our courses can't use such restrictions due
to set standards. The users should be free to navigate to any storyline
block based on own preferences. Also we have to use multiple storyline
blocks in each rise lesson as per design.

Please suggest other ways to fix it. Also it's very critical request for us
to publish our courses on LMS and we can't do it now because of this
problem.

Thanks for that understanding, Ramraj. Storyline blocks in a Rise 360 lesson don't communicate or affect one another, so there currently isn't a way for one Storyline block to automatically pause when another Storyline block starts playing.

I would suggest a slide without audio at the beginning of your Storyline interactions. That way, you can let the learner control the audio experience in the same way they have control over how they navigate. Another way is to include a trigger to pause the audio in Storyline so they can stop and move to another Storyline block with audio at their choosing.

I hope that helps for now!

Hi, Peter. We should be able to get your continue button to work the way you need!

Try using a course completion trigger in your Storyline project, for example "Complete course when media completes." The continue button will respect whether the Storyline interaction is completed instead of just unlocking as the Storyline interaction plays. Here's how to make that work.

The traditional function of the continue button is to progressively reveal content. It provides pace rather than having a learner scroll too quickly through your lesson. Once a learner has initially experienced that content, the continue button remains gone so they can review more quickly if they revisit a lesson.

I understand also that your client requires autoplaying audio in your lesson, and that's why you're using the Storyline block as a workaround. If autoplay were an option in Rise 360, tell me more about how you envision multiple audio files would behave in one lesson.

1. When would each audio file begin playing? As soon as the lesson is opened?
2. How would you prevent those audio files from overlapping?

This type of insight really helps our team understand design needs. Thank you!

Thank you for your suggestions, but I have a question how rise controls
this behavior with multimedia video block where when users click on one
video the other playing video automatically gets stopped on the same page?

We want similar user experience and I have opened a support ticket for that
as user experience is very critical for our designing standards

Hi Ramraj,

Thanks for opening a case and working through this with our team. You're in good hands with Chino.

Rise 360 does pause audio or video files to prevent overlapping because those media files are directly uploaded to your lesson, but Storyline Blocks are handled differently because they have their own player.

Hopefully Chino can suggest a solution that works for you!

Running into this problem on our end, too, and am currently troubleshooting for the best solution. To begin with, I really just want to use the built-in media player within Rise. It works exactly how we want, it just doesn't do captions. Embed media players with caption toggles won't work either, because the learner can skip the video without it completing. So here we are, building a SL block per video.

This would work fine-ish, if it weren't for a very persistent auto-play feature for Storyline, which means all the videos startup at the same time after you have visited the site once and 'cleared' the continue blocks. 

Does anyone have a way to make a Storyline video not auto-play while keeping the seekbar and media in-sync?

Here are the workarounds I've tried:

• Pause timeline trigger when slide loads, so it never autoplays
  • This separates the timeline seekbar from the media. If I pause or start the video by clicking the video, it starts the video, but not the seekbar. This is really confusing UI.
• Any triggers that try to pause the timeline OR pause the video if the video has been viewed
  • See triggers. I've tried pausing timeline, pausing media. Nothing. I've tried lots of these.
  • The slide is set to resume saved state.
  • I've even put the variable in text on the slide, and it won't "remember" that it was changed to true when I revisit. It will flip to true, then on revisiting, it flips back to false. How can it retain these triggers? Again, slide set to resumed state.
• Set media to play only when triggered/clicked.
  • This again separates the seekbar from the playbar. The user stares at a black screen while the timeline is going. I thought something was broken before I realized I had to click the video. 
• Removing the seekbar and only using the video player controls.
  • Ok, I'd have to make the story size bigger on all 19 videos. This is probably my next thing -- but really?

Again, this is a LOT of work to just get captions to work.

Thanks!

Hi Alex! It sounds like what you really need is a closed captioning feature in a Rise 360 video block, is that right? We're tracking that popular request, so I'll add your vote to the list.

In the meantime, I'll open the floor to the community for their ideas of how you can best configure the triggers in the Storyline block. 

Yes, please!

Ok, so here's our fix, which LOOKS nice, and works well. It takes two slides. Hopefully this helps someone. It took way too long to figure out.

First slide is a holding slide. We took freeze frames of the video and did a play overlay icon, so the learner knows to click the slide. When they click the slide, it advances to the next slide, which auto-plays the video. When you revisit, you again go back to the holding slide (slide 1). Triggers attached. 

Be sure to take off the seekbar from slide 1, or you may have learners trying to press that play button, which won't work. We have the seekbar coming in on slide 2 (the video slide).

So as a follow-up, this approach is really a band-aid to the lack of CC support in Rise.

The end result for us was a 220mb published file from Rise. There are 19 videos that are like 110mb together. When we inserted them just as videos and NOT as Storyline blocks we saved 70mb in the published output. (Videos were compressed in both and the same size).

On top of that, it's an extra place of complexity and I fear the LMS we're working with doesn't super love it. Learners going through it so far have had some squirrely issues.

Anyways, we may opt to publish out a captioned and non-captioned version to 'solve' this for now.

Thank you for sharing your solution, Alex.

Good news, everyone!

Now you can make your videos accessible by adding closed captions in Rise 360. Simply import a caption file for each language you want to support. Check out the video demo in this discussion, and find more details here!

Is there a way to make Storyline inserts with audio play automatically?  I embedded an animated slide (no audio) in Storyline 360.  It played automatically (after the user clicks the continue divider).  All good.  I then edited the slide to add audio and embedded it again.  Now it requires the user to click play.  This can be good in some cases, but in this case, I would prefer that it play automatically.  

Also, is there a way to get the storyline embeds to go fullscreen, similar to the "Image & Text" feature wherein if you click the image it goes full screen?  I would like to make more custom interactions with layers, etc in storyline to embed in Rise. They'd look better full screen in many cases.