Is there something unusual about the HTML5 output format from Captivate?

Question

One of my clients has a series of tutorial movies - no user interaction and no SWF features that I know of apart from a widget to play/pause/rewind etc., which is easily removed. Their software is embedded on a PC which may not always have Internet access, so the tutorials need to be accessible in the same way. HTML5 would be ideal as the file sizes for MP4 videos are enormous in comparison. If I use Captivate 2019 to create a movie in HTML5 output then it plays fine in a browser window but there's no control over playing and pausing etc.
One answer I think would be to use an HTML5 player application to run the movie on the PC and give the user some control. However, I am told by the software team that the format of the HTML5 files from Captivate is not "standard", but is a custom format of some sort which is not suitable for use with a player. No other details than that.

I can't find anything in the community on this from previous posts, so does this sound familiar to anyone? I have read that HTML5 is designed for web-based applications so is it a good solution in this case? Should a player work? Any further information or suggestions would be much appreciated, thanks.

RodWard · Accepted Answer

The JSON files are for rendering PNG or GIF graphics. You will find they are used in several places in a Captivate project.

If you need a playbar for your project, why not just use one of the standard HTML5 Playbars that come with Captivate. They will allow you to play or pause content. If you load your videos as Slide videos (not Event videos) then the normal playbar that controls the main slide timeline will also control the video playback.

RodWard · Answer

Your software team might be referring to the fact that Captivate's HTML5 output is designed to be delivered from a web server environment, and that means that some functionality will not work as expected if you try to play it locally just from a hard drive or LAN drive.

You might not notice any issues with a very simple Captivate HTML5 project, but as soon as you start including certain types of functionality in the project, then you will find that it does not work without the web server.

One of the issues is due to the fact that Captivate's HTML5 output uses JSON files to deliver some of the images (mostly PNGs). We often get questions here on the forum where users find that even when the content IS delivered from their web server or LMS server that it does not work as expected. The reason often turns out to be that the server is not configured to allow JSON files.

Captivate's 360 VR content will not work unless delivered from a web server. Another area is related to OAM animations. If you are creating these animations externally to Captivate (e.g. using Adobe Animate) and then importing them into the CPTX project, you'll find they do not work without web server environment. These are just a few examples.

When you test publish a Captivate project to HTML5 in Browser, it creates a temporary localhost web server to play the content properly. So in many cases Captivate developers can be unaware that the same content might not play flawlessly when they put it on the corporate LAN network drive for others to view.

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