Video Issue - Please Help

[dcarterc]

Hi All,

So I have a project in AP that has a presenter video that's about 170mb playing at the same time that I have a captivate movie (it's only 900k) playing on the main stage (slide) area. When I publish locally everything works fine.

However, when I throw it up on the web, neither movie appears. I did a test and published without the presenter panel movie ,and the captivate movie loaded fine. I re-published, putting the presenter panel movie back in and again nothing works. Thoughts?

I'm suspecting at 170MB, my presenter panel movie is too large and it's causing loading issues, right? Does anyone know what an ideal size is for a movie in the presenter panel? Or, know what I"m doing wrong?

Many thanks,

Dave

[brianosmi]

Hello Dave,
Have you ever successfully played FLVs from your web server? If not, then it is possible that FLV is not registered as a MIME type on your server: Dave Mozealous: Why won't my FLV's playback when deployed via a server?. If you have, then obviously this is not the issue and I would agree with you on the loading issues.

I haven't experienced loading issues with FLV in the presenter panel, but most of my clips are around 5-6 mb in file size and under 2 minutes in length. Rather than having a 170 mb FLV, it would be better, if possible, to chop it into several smaller bites that you could then display over several slides in your presentation.

How are you using presenter video with Captivate slides? It would be cool to have a simulation built with Captivate and a talking head video giving the user instructions and tips...

[dcarterc]

Hi Brian,

Thank you for the quick reply. No this is my first time testing FLV's on our server. I'll have to contact IT and see what they say. I'm also going to see what I can do to cut down the file size a bit.

Basically we are a medical company and I'm taking an instructor led course about FDA awareness and making it web-based. My thought was to have the presenter video playing while the slides move in sync with the presenter video.

Since AP doesn't allow you to have one presenter video with multiple slides I had to click through the slides and capture them with Captivate and then import that as a movie. That was the only way I could sync the slides with the presenter video without doing a lot of video editing...

[dcarterc]

One more interesting thing to note is SWFs play fine on our server. However in this instance not only is the FLV not playing but neither is my captivate movie which is SWF.

[brianosmi]

If your company is using Windows 2003 Server, then I'll bet it is the mime type issue.

Cool work around using Captivate to capture your Presenter slides.

[brianosmi]

Originally Posted by dcarterc

One more interesting thing to note is SWFs play fine on our server. However in this instance not only is the FLV not playing but neither is my captivate movie which is SWF.

SWF files will play fine, but for some reason Microsoft did not make FLV a default mime type with Server 2003. When you try to play back an Articulate course that contains FLV, if your server is not configured to support it the presentation will "freeze up" when it comes to the slide containing the offending video. I would say that Articulate is freezing before the Captivate movie has a chance to start playing.

[dcarterc]

Ahh I see! Ok, well I just emailed IT to try to get some more info, so we'll see what happens. In the meantime I'm going to test it on my own external personal FTP site.

Thanks for the help Brian.

- Dave

[brianosmi]

Dave, any time! Let us know if you are able to get the issue resolved...

Again, thanks for the tip on using Captivate to work around the limitation with using presenter video. I'm sure it will be useful for many people here.

[dcarterc]

I certainly will! No problem regarding Captivate. I just don't have the time to sit there and edit 90 minutes of video to get it to sync up with multiple slides. I found Captivate to be the easiest workaround, and it ends up looking very nice!

I wonder if the next release of AP will fix this limitation? It'd be nice to have 'sync slides' feature with video!

[brianosmi]

I totally agree - it would be awesome! If you have not yet submitted a feature request, you might consider doing so here: http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/feature/.

I know that this has been a much requested feature and, like you, I hope to see it in the next release.