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

New Here ,
Mar 24, 2021 Mar 24, 2021

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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.

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Community Expert , Mar 25, 2021 Mar 25, 2021

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.

 

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Participant ,
Mar 24, 2021 Mar 24, 2021

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I'd like to help you with this, but it is diffucult to understand your use case.

 

What do the "tutorial movies" consist of? Captivate slides or something else?

 

What is the embedded software?

 

You can include controls in any captivate HTML5 output, so I am not clear on the details of your project.

 

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New Here ,
Mar 25, 2021 Mar 25, 2021

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Hi @ChrisG LMS thanks for trying to understand me! The movies are indeed just slides created in Captivate showing screenshots, mouse animations, captions and that's about it. They are to help users of a software package that drives laboratory instrumentation on a stand-alone PC connected to the instrument, and are selected from a menu within that software.

Previously (when the tutorials were created as an executable file) the screens contained a widget that had play/pause/rewind buttons etc but this is an SWF control which I have to remove now. I am not aware of similar controls I can add for an HTML5 output in Captivate - are there any?

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Community Expert ,
Mar 24, 2021 Mar 24, 2021

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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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New Here ,
Mar 25, 2021 Mar 25, 2021

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Thanks for that information @RodWard, I will pass it on to the software team to see if it helps us. The tutorials are just slides created in Captivate showing screenshots, mouse animations, captions and that's about it, so about as simple as they can be I would think.

Do you know if the HTML5 players promoted for use in viewing films in web pages have the same requirements as you discuss in your answer? Do they also require the system to accept JSON files? Maybe they are only suitable for playing in a web server environment rather than on a stand-alone PC...?

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Community Expert ,
Mar 25, 2021 Mar 25, 2021

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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.

 

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