Closed captioning in 2017; limit to caption?

Report · Jul 28, 2018

I have a series of videos for my class that I converted to HTML5 and .MP4 without issue in 6 and then updated recently to CP 2017. The earlier versions work fine on my website and YouTube, respectively.

I'm now trying to update the HTML5 output with closed captions, which is easy enough to do on my side, however when I FTP to server I'm often left with a "loading" symbol in the browser and no actual loading. This is related to individual captions within a slide within a project.

After buggering around with this for far too long I'm wondering if there is a limit to the allowed length of a caption or if something beyond my comprehension is at play here. The captions are chemistry language-based but just text and no symbols. I have gone step-by-step adding a caption, publishing, uploading output and I'm not yet seeing any pattern to why I'm having problems. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Report · Jul 28, 2018

Does the text contain any greater than or less than symbols (< or >) or any ampersands and equals signs? Some of these can foul up the output because they also occur in JavaScript code, which is used extensively in HTML5 output.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

Thanks for the reply. No, it's just plain English text. I even took all the hyphens out to see if that would work but unfortunately not. On tutorial videos on YouTube they seem to get away with full sentences, however they don't show the conversion to HTML5.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

Perhaps to see if this is the issue, create a copy of the project and just strip out all captions.

Publish and test.

Works? If so, then yeah, gotta noodle into the captions specifically (length, characters).

Still doesn't work? There's some other issue.

Sometimes projects, especially those that are upgraded (?), contain 'old' info.

A common trick is to create a new, blank project with the same overall settings as the original project, open the original project, copy all slides, paste those slides into the new project....

Report · Jul 29, 2018

Thanks for the input Erik. I tried all of that and got one video to work perfectly with captions. Then did exactly the same for the second and I'm getting the same issue again. I have 125 of these things to caption, with 5-10 slides each, so I might be giving up.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

125 is daunting, no doubt!

So 'it' worked with one, but not a second.

Assuming 'it' means copy/paste slides from old to new?

The v.6 CP versions did not have captions and worked fine?

Do you have CP6 still so you can add captions to the originals?

Or you have to use the latest CP to add captions...?

Have you applied the latest CP patch?

If so, maybe deinstall CP and reinstall fresh and don't apply the patch...then try.

If not, apply the patch.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

All the videos were created in 6 without captions and have worked every time as HTML5 output on my website. I then opened them one-by-one in CP17 and saved as .cptx in the updated version of the software. After some editing of sound and graphics files were then converted into .MP4 for YouTube and HTML5 for my webpage. No problems there after uploading and they work well on all of the devices I have. No captions at this point.

My first attempt at captions in CP17 lead to no loading after FTP to server until I broke the captions in that video down to short phrases. Second video (made in 6, updated to 17) was captioned the same way but is not loading after FTP. I can't find any indication to maximum caption length anywhere so it all seems a little random. I'm going to try your suggestion about copy/paste from 6 to 17 and see if that gets me anywhere. If not I'm just going to stick to something logical and understandable; Organic Chemistry. 🙂

Cheers!

Report · Jul 29, 2018

Solid explanation. Hope it all works.

Another possibility - it could be FTP transfer issues - either in settings or in completion.

First, check the remote file list and compare to your local list - do all file sizes match up? Sure the upload process is completing properly? No reported FTP errors?

if all seems well, depending on your program, you may be able to select transfer options as 'binary' or 'ASCII'. Perhaps try switching it from one to the other, upload to different directory, and try that.

If 'lucky', it could be an FTP transfer issue instead of a project issue. Do you have another server or method to try (i.e. perhaps check the SCORM option, publish, upload to Scorm Cloud, and see if it loads)

Report · Jul 29, 2018

You might be onto something here Erik.

The index.html files open without problem in browsers on the desktop. After FTP they don't work as detailed above. I then downloaded the files back from the server by FTP (into a different folder) and index.html now won't load from my C drive. Hmmmm.

Let's see if your Filezilla or the server is/are the issue.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

I switched to Binary on Filezilla and now the file sizes all match and the video files open from the server!

Thank you very much Erik for your input and patience.

Now I have to update another 123 of these things. 🙂