Captivate 5 SCORM 1.2 lessons stalling at start

[Steve Howard, ACP]

We have bunches of Captivate lessons, all published with the same settings.

2 of those lessons are currently not launching correctly whjen uploaded to our LMS.

The lessons will launch, and show the Captivate Launching... splash and the progressbar, then go to a black screen.

Our LMS (GeeLearning 4) uses a Java app to aid API communication between lessons and the LMS, and the debug console reports that there is no SCORM API communication. We are soon to migrate to GeoLearning 5, and this has a diffrent playback engine, but it also suggests no SCORM communication is happening.

I've republished the lessons, with no effect.

I've copy/pasted thje lessons into the shell of working lessons, then republished, still no help.

I've tried different settings, but still no help.

... and a few other things, but still no fix

Any suggestions to what I may have overlooked in troubleshooting this?

Steve

[RodWard]

Steve,

I take it you've already confirmed this black screen error has nothing to do with the recent Flash Player 10.1 issue with Animated Text in Cp5?

[Steve Howard, ACP]

Yes I looked at that.

• 5 lessons in a course, all have Animated text.
• All 5 published from the same machine with the same settings.
• The machine has the fix for animated text issues installed.
• 2 of the 5 lessons won't run.

😞

[RodWard]

Have you tried clearing your Captivate cache and republishing those lessons that refuse to run?

[Steve Howard, ACP]

Nice idea - but no joy. Thanks though!

Steve

[RodWard]

OK, back to basics:

1. Create a blank presentation with one slide, no captions or preloaders or skins, publish, upload to LMS and confirm whether or not it plays.
2. If yes, start adding objects, beginning with a text animation.  Then publish upload to test.  Find out whether or not all Captivate objects and trimmings are accepted by your target LMS/webserver combo.
3. If the LMS doesn't go black screen yet, copy a single slide from your problem lessons into this (so far successful) lesson and test.
4. Keep going this way slowly until you can replicate the issue after adding something.

I realise this will take a lot of time, but it's the only way I know to find tricky issues like this.

If you can replicate the issue at step 1, and it plays OK on you PC locally but not on the LMS, it's got to be something in your LMS settings that is choking on something in your Captivate content.  Watch out for the fact that many corporate systems use a lot of proxy caching to save bandwidth.  So you may find you're actually looking at old content even though you've updated it.  Mark each new iteration with a callout displaying which version you are on so that you can be sure it's not cached.

If you replicate at step 2 as soon as you start adding text animations, somehow your patch hasn't taken.  But you should still be able to replicate the same issue on your own system if you are on Flash Player 10.2.

If you replicate the issue at step 3 or later, there's something in one or more of your slides, possbly corrupted elements, that has caused the issue.

Hope this helps.

[Steve Howard, ACP]

Rod,

thanks for that - I've pretty much been doing that already.

It seems that I have at least 2 or 3 other lessons (I have about 100 total) are now doing this. It's random, so far as I can tell. At least one of the lessons doing this has no text animation. Lessons that were fine afew days ago are not fine now. I may be the only one seeing the black screens, but I can replicate it on 3 different machines.

Biggest pain is that I am up to my eyes in other tasks so I can't devote all the time I need to this one issue.

I'll dig a little more....

[RodWard]

If you have limited time, look for any Flash animations and recorded typing text first.  Whenever I've had issues with corrupted projects those two object types have been the ones that caused it.

[nsukumar]

Hi Steve,

   Opening the published '*.swf' file also gives the same result or it’s happening only when you try to launch it from your LMS? Is it possible for you to share the problem .cptx, published files with us so that we can investigate the issue on our end? Please send the files to nsukumar@adobe.com.

Thanks,

nsukumar.

[etutor]

Steve,

I had a similar problem trying to get a SCO running on my LMS. It turned out to be an apostrophe in the CP title. We had similar symptoms. It would start to launch then hang. As soon as I removed the apostrophe and re-published the LMS launched just fine. Our LMS allows editing the title once it is uploaded so we could put the apostrophe back in. This one drove us nuts for quite awhile since we did not get any error messages from the LMS....

Dave

[Itzelm]

Did anyone find a solution to this? We are having the same problem with only one lesson. The lesson as a swf

works fine. But the scormed version does not ldisplay on Moodle LMS. the file name has no strange characters.

[tolney]

We've had the same problem with this and have instructed developers using Captivate 5 NOT to use Text Animation. Remove the animated text - republish the scorm package - and the lessons run just fine when integrated into the LMS. We use two LMSs - one built in-house and one that we're migrating to for the enterprise - PeopleSoft ELM (rebranded and somewhat customized as VZLearn).

[Steve Howard, ACP]

My problem was that Captivate movies embedded inside my Captivate movies had used Animated Text and had not been republished

after updating Captivate with the fix for the issue.

Here's what I had to do:

• Republish each embedded file, making sure to check "Force republish all the slides"
• Reimport each embedded swf
• Republish thje main Captivate movie, making sure to check "Force republish all the slides"

HTH

Steve