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Lavish_elegance15C2
Known Participant
February 7, 2014
Question

Slow loading videos, how to fix?

  • February 7, 2014
  • 3 replies
  • 8259 views

I have a captivate course that has a 25 minute video as the bulk of the course (followed by a quiz)

When uploaded as a MP4 (about 300 mb), it takes about 10 minutes for the video to start playing.. which is unacepptable!

I tried cutting up the video at logical points till I had 8 videos (15 - 30 mbs average) on 8 consecutive slides; preloader was set to 10%.. i figured the first video would take about a minute to load but the rest should pre-load... but NO, the project stops at each video and loads for 2-3 minutes... still not acceptable!

What can I do?

Surely, someone out there has made a video heavy e-course, what's the fix?

P.S. I also tried using the youtube interaction; and while it does load almost instantly since it's youtube, the widget is incredibly limiting (doesn't pause with the project, won't scale properly, etc...

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

TLCMediaDesign
TLCMediaDesign
Inspiring
February 10, 2014

Your server has to be set up to stream video. GoDaddy does NOT support streaming video. It should be able to accomodate progressive download. That should be the option checked when you import the video to Captivate.

If you are using streaming or progressive download, there is nothing to preload.

You could also try using a preload script, but it will not work in IE.

<video controls="controls" preload="auto">
  <source src="sample.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  ...
  Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

A
Anonymous
February 7, 2014

We have created several courses now which rely heavily on videos.  Each course has a video which is about an hour long followed by a quiz.

To make this happen, we took several steps.

First , we found a video hosting site which lets us do video streaming using ABR (Adaptive Bit Rate).  This lets the video start playing within a few seconds of the webpage being presented.  You can put a video file on a standard web server, but it will only do "Progressive" downloading where almost the entire video must be downloaded before it will start playing.  You will have to pay some money for this type of Video Hosting site (the "big dogs" of video hosting are Brightcove.com and Ooyala.com).  Once you upload your video to them, they re-encode it to the correct formats that it needs to play to the various devices.  They also give you the HTML to put on your web page so the video plays back correctly and it knows how much data to "feed" the device which is playing the video.

Next we broke up our video into Chapter or parts which last between 5 and ten minutes.  We didn't want the student to get to minute 58 of a 60 minute video, cancel out and then have to watch the entire 60 minutes again the next time they started the course.

We then took the HTML that we got from our video provider and loaded it onto some web pages which we serve up on our servers.  We created a different web page for each video chapter.

Then using Captivate 7, we used their web object widget and pointed each slide to a different web page (one for each chapter).  We ended up with between 8 and 10 video slides per course, followed by a random 25 question quiz.

We just published our 2nd course using this technique and the end-users really seem to like it.

L
Lavish_elegance15C2Author
Known Participant
February 7, 2014

Interesting, that helps quite a bit!

Now if I understand you correctly, you're using a the Captivate web ocject widget to place your video (from a web page) onto your captivate slide.

Could this same process be done using a embedded youtube video? That would save me from using an expensive video streaming service

thanks!

A
Anonymous
February 7, 2014

Yes, BUT....

There are 2 reasons why we didn't go with youtube videos.

First, many of the people who will be taking our courses work in offices which automatically block youtube videos.  They are not our employees so we do not control what type of environment they will be working from.

Second, youtube videos use a Progressive download, not streaming.  Often times the quality was not very good.

Don't know if it is true or not, but at one time I had heard that if your youtube video was over a certain time duration (it might have been 10 or 15 minutes), then youtube would automatically play a commercial (of their choosing) before your video played.

There is also a question of who owns your video once you load it on youtube?

Also, if you want your students to be able to take your course on mobile devices, check to make sure that the Captivate youtube widget is HTML5 compatible.  We were not using youtube so I never checked to see if it was HTML5 compatable.

If those things don't concern you, then go for it and save a few dollars.

B
bkcoughlin
Inspiring
February 7, 2014

I'm working on a similar setup with a project.  I've uploaded my files to a server and tested out with IE 11 and it starts playing my 20-40 mb videos within 1-2 second.  Watching the Task Manager network info, it's still downloading for 3-4 seconds while playing, so it appears to start before the enitire file is downloaded. 

Using H.264 to encode.  How are you encoding your mp4?

L
Lavish_elegance15C2Author
Known Participant
February 7, 2014

I am also using H.264 to encode; my videos are upload to my GoDaddy server but my videos take about 2-3 minutes to load; they don't seem to play at all before file is fully downloaded (tested on Safari).

any ideas why that is?

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