LOCAL HTML5 PLAYBACK FROM CAPTIVATE 9.0.2.437

[Limetools]

Hi,

Has anyone else noticed a difference in the way HTML5 output plays back when playing from a local hard drive?

I have had some serious issues with a project over the past couple of weeks ( initially thought it may have been because of incorporating 2 drag and drop interactions - as per an earlier question on the forum), that has delayed my release of the project to my client. A little note here is to mention that quite a bit of our material is used in a seminar / presentation environment, so local playback as opposed to web or LMS delivery has always been the preferred choice.... with no problems. The only difference in my set-up is the update to Captivate 9.0.2.437 a couple of weeks back. I have re-published old projects that previously played without any problems using the latest Captivate build and have now the following issues...

It seems that Chrome needs to pre-load the entire project before playing at all, Explorer loads almost straight away but has frozen towards the end of the project. The only browser that seems to play the project back without a problem is Mozilla Firefox.

I have experimented with all levels of  Preload - from 0% to 100% ( not sure whether this makes a difference for local playback or for HTML5 content ), and the results are always the same.

This issue is really biting into my company's day to day work as the deadlines do not stop. If this is an issue with the new Captivate version, does anyone know a way to rollback to the previous version?

All help gratefully received,

Ashley

[RodWard]

HTML5 content is really more designed to be played from a web server environment.

If you have a need to play modules standalone from a local hard drive as a seminar presentation, I would recommend you publish them to EXE format instead of HTML5.

[Limetools]

Thanks Rod, I understand and agree with what you are saying and will explore EXE... although my first couple of attempts just managed to crash Flash and won't play.

It would still be interesting to see what has happened with the HTML 5 though as this has always proved to be the best option in the past. Weirdly, the output seems to work on my colleagues MS Surface which is running Windows 10 whilst my machines are running Windows 7.

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

If you are having issues where a published EXE is crashing the Flash Player, then I think you may be dealing with something corrupted on a slide somewhere in your project. If so, that might explain your issues with HTML5 content from the same project.

I suggest you try hiding groups of slides in this project to see if you can get it to play as expected without certain slides being published.  You may be able to whittle it down to a particular slide or object on a slide that is causing all of this.

[Limetools]

Thanks again for you help. I tried exporting another project as an EXE and it works a treat... as you say it may be a corrupted slide... this particular project has definitely been a problem child! A

[Eric Dumas]

For that reason, I installed free tools to allow my computer to run like a web server (MAMP, WAMP and others) to get an accurate preview before uploading. The free part of scorm cloud is also really useful.

[Limetools]

Thanks Eric, I will have to look into doing the same by the sounds of it. Weird thing is that the same output has worked without an issue on Windows 8, Windows 10 and MAC machines. Just so many variables out there to trip us up.