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luke7
Participant
October 10, 2007
Question

How best to download large SWF files

  • October 10, 2007
  • 2 replies
  • 377 views
Hi, I am making long presentations (1hr) in captivate, by importing powerpoint slides and then adding a prerecorded narration that runs in sync. I have been careful to reduce the file size as much as possible, but 32kbps audio x 60mins = 14.4MB, so the files are going to be big whatever.

Really, I want to stream the presentations - the overall bit rate is quite low at 35kbps or something similar and should stream fine on most connections. I know that this is quite tricky to do with a presentation (as opposed to a flv video). I have searched the forums but cannot see how to do this with a narrated presentation easily.

The other option is to do a pretend streaming setup, by changing the preloader %. I have done this, but I do not get good results on slow connections - even with the default of 60% I find that the first slide (with no audio) will display fine but then I will see a blank screen for some period of time before the next slide (with audio) begins. I'm doing presentations with 50+ slides so you would think that the 2nd slide would be completely loaded once 60% of the project has been! Does captivate make swf files that download chronologically (ie, slide by slide) or what? How can I make it?

As the bit rate is so low I would ideally like to set the preloader % to someting like 15%, and have the rest of the project download as the user is watching the beginning of the presentation.

I wonder whether the fact that i added the audio to captivate as one large track is causing problems? I added one large track and then used the audio editor to insert all the slide timings.

any ideas???
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    2 replies

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    luke7Author
    Participant
    October 10, 2007
    thanks, that is one option. but this will still result in the same overall waiting time, the wait simply split up with each swf file. What i am looking for is some way of ROBUSTLY loading latter slides once the early slides have been loaded and are being viewed.

    Any other ides?
    A
    Anonymous
    October 10, 2007
    Hello there,

    My recommendation would be to split the Captivate project file up into more manageable segments and then load the next SWF once the previous one has finished. To create this daisy chain effect you would need to do this following.

    1. Split up your Captivate project into a number of segments and publish these as SWF files. When publishing you may also want to enable one of the preloaders that ship with Adobe Captivate.
    2. Open the first of the source Adobe Captivate files
    3. Choose Edit > Preferences
    4. Select the Category Project, followed by Start and End
    5. From the Project end options Action menu choose Open other project
    6. Click the Browse button (denoted by the symbol "...")
    7. Select the next SWF fille you want to load.
    8. Click OK.

    Now to do the same for the rest of the source project files. On the last Captivate file you should set the Action menu to Stop.

    Note: Learners on a slow internet connection may still notice a slight delay, but there really isn't anything you can do about this. At work we created a custom SWF preloader that works with content served both via our Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional servers as well as via IIS to try and get around the network traffic lags and even with this there are times that the occasional lag can occur.

    HTH

    Best - Mark


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