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sam_cs
Participant
July 10, 2007
Question

Scaling Captivate videos within RoboHelp

  • July 10, 2007
  • 1 reply
  • 463 views
Hello All,

I am having a little bit of a problem using some videos, which I created using Captivate, in RoboHelp. Ideally I want the videos to be able to scale within the webhelp frame so that people with small screen resolutions do not have to scroll up and down the window as the video plays. I imagine that it must be possible as I can obtain the desired effect by open the flash movies directly with a browser(firefox and IE both give me results I am happy with). As far as I am aware RoboHelp will not let me link to the videos directly because they cannot be part of the project. I have tried to resize the videos with a hml page by specifying a percentage width and height and using a bit of javascript but icouldn't seem to get anything to work; the video would scale to an arbitrary percentage which was not relevant to window size or the data I had input.
I guess the main problem is that I probably do not know enough about flash movies. Does the way in which captivate exports the videos effect their ability to scale? I am trying to avoid making different resolution versions of each of the videos as I am dealing with hundreds of captivate movies and they are probably going to be deployed over the internet.
Hope this all makes sense.
Kind Regards

Sam
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    1 reply

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    July 10, 2007
    Hi Sam and welcome to our community

    As far as I am aware RoboHelp will not let me link to the videos directly because they cannot be part of the project.

    I'm assuming that you are referring to the ability to just create a hyperlink that points generically to the .SWF? If I'm correct, of course you can. You just need to add the .SWF to the RoboHelp Baggage Files area.

    I have tried to resize the videos with a hml page by specifying a percentage width and height and using a bit of javascript but icouldn't seem to get anything to work; the video would scale to an arbitrary percentage which was not relevant to window size or the data I had input.

    Out of curiosity, why the JavaScript? I think if I were in your shoes, I'd perhaps try inserting the .SWF in a RoboHelp topic, then locate the HTML code and see if I was able to insert a percentage there. I'm not sure if this will work, as I've not tried it. But it may be worth trying.

    Does the way in which captivate exports the videos effect their ability to scale?

    The answer to this is a definite "Yes and No". When you publish a Captivate movie, you also normally publish an associated HTML file. The HTML file is intended to be placed in the same general folder. Its purpose is to ensure your movie is presented to your user at the same size you determined when you created it. This is because everything inside a Captivate movie is bitmapped images. And when you resize bitmapped images, the quality normally begins to suffer.

    Hopefully this helps... Rick
    S
    sam_csAuthor
    Participant
    July 10, 2007
    Rick,
    Firstly, many thanks for your swift reply, It has been very helpful.
    I had tried making a hyperlink directly to the swf but must have not included them in the robohelp baggage files area. I now seem to have a useable solution. YAY. I will not be able to keep my headers and footers but that is not a massive problem. It just requires me to go through the 500 topics and change all of the hyperlinks so that they link directly to the swf instead of the html file! I don't suppose you know if robohelp has any built in batch operations or a way in which i could script this?

    The reason that I previously had a look at using java script is because the SWFs would scale correctly if I determine the width with a pixel value, but, if I used a percentage value it would just scale they would not scale correctly. When I decided to try to use javascript i guessed that the problem was that when using the percentage it was inputting a floating point value into the width. I used javascript to try and make this an integer to replicate entering a pixel value.

    I know that changing the scale of the SWFs will reduce the quality, but it is a choice between it scaling and being slightly lower quality, and, the resolution of the video being too big for the resolution of the screen viewing it. I think I prefer it fitting on screen, although I have spoken to people with the opposite opinion.

    Thanks again

    Sam
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