Play Pause functionality issue in Captivate 2019

[Devendar singh]

Hi,

I am facing issue while implementing play pause functionality in my WBT.

Clicking play/pause button, after the slide ends takes to me the next screen.

[Lilybiri]

Is this a custom play/pause button? If yes, have a look at:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/custom-play-slash-pause-button-version-cp2019

[Rahul_Abhale_TCS]

Hi Lilybiri

I have referred your above blog and i did same as you suggested in Step 3.

But once slide reach at the end of the slide and then again press play/pause button that time slide move on the next slide.

[Lilybiri]

It looks indeed, like Rod also tells, that you are missing some basic information about the design of Captivate's Timeline. I have been blogging quite a lot about that much ignored and very important topic.

Captivate is not at all a presentation tool (like PPT) where each slide can only be started by an action from the presentator.  The design of Captivate in slides is meant to make management a lot easier than in one long video timeline. See each slide as a video clip. The clips are shown in a sequence, normally without any transition (slide transitions are typical for a presentation, not for eLearning). When the last frame of a slide is reached the playhead will continue to the first frame of the next slide. The learner should not even be aware of that transition between slides. This makes editing very comfortable, believe me!

The Play/Pause button I explained in that blog (and interactive video) will pause the timeline at any moment, and restart playing at any moment, no matter which slide it is on. That is the reason I timed it for the rest of the project. 

The automatic playing of the movie can be paused by such a Pause command (used in the button) or by a Pausing point inserted using an interactive object. The result is NOT the same, as I explained extensively in one of the blog posts:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/pausing-captivates-timeline

[RodWard]

If the slide is pausing because you have an interactive object on the slide to stop the timeline, then clicking the Play button at that point would move you beyond the object's pause point and the timeline would continue into the next slide.  That's totally normal behaviour for a Captivate module.

With Captivate, the timeline will continue to play from the beginning of the module through all slides until the end slide, UNLESS something pauses the playback.  This can be in the form of an interactive object such as a Text Entry Box, Click Box, or Button.  But it would also happen on special slides such as a Quiz slide or a Drag and Drop slide where the learner is expected to interact with the content as well.

I realise that some other authoring tools (e.g. Articulate Storyline) do things differently and pause each slide at the end of its timeline by default.  In those apps you need to turn off the pausing to have the timeline continue from one slide to the next.  In Captivate it's the opposite.  You just need to get accustomed to the way it works.

[CDubber]

It's taken me awhile to understand how Captivate handles this, mainly because I was confused by the Continue action in the On Enter pulldown. If Captivate by default just keeps playing content linearly from slide to slide unless the timeline is intentionally paused (so, continuing along the timeline from the previous slide), what is the purpose of the Continue action for On Enter? Intuitively I assumed I had to select the Continue action on each slide to keep my course going, since, conversely, No Action implies nothing at all is going to happen.

[Lilybiri]

No action, which is the default choice, is fine both for On Enter and On Exit. It is only necessary to change it when you have been pausing the timeline intentionally at the first frame of the slide. No action measn that the present workflow will continue.

If you use an advanced or shared action On Enter for the slide, without adding Continue as last command, the playhead will remain at the first frame of the slide.

As I mention in my articles about the Timeline, best way to explore the behavior is to insert the system variable cpInfoCurrentFrame in a text container on the first slide, and time that container for the rest of the project. You will be able to see exactly where the playhead is stopping.

[RodWard]

It's not really all that hard to understand. Since any interactive object is going to pause the timeline, you need to have a Continue action available in case you want to deliberately make the timeline continue again.

[Devendar singh]

I understand what you said. But I want to know whether there is a way of implementing play/pause functionality which does not affect the navigation from one slide to another? 

As we have created a WBT which has different pages(slides) and also have play/pause functionality.

And at the end of slide if we click on play/pause button it navigates to the next slide.

Please suggest if there is a way for implementing this.

[RodWard]

I'm sorry but now it's my turn not to understand.  Play/pause functionality is all about the timeline, and in any slide-based authoring app that means it is going to be intrinsically related to navigation from one slide to the next.  So, I don't quite understand what you mean by "does not affect the navigation from one slide to another"? 

Could you be a little clearer about what you mean here?

With Captivate you are either allowing the slide to progress naturally to the next slide in the slide order, or you can set up Actions that get triggered by the On Exit event of the slide that will take the user to a different slide which may not be the next one in the order.

The Play/Pause button only does one of those two things.  If the timeline is currently paused, clicking the button will make it continue.  If the timeline is currently moving, clicking the button will make it pause.  If you want the navigation to work differently to this, you need to set up some other interactive objects that allow the user to dictate where they go, or else you set up Actions/Advanced Actions/Conditional Actions etc that are triggered by timeline events such as On Slide Enter or On Slide Exit.

[Lilybiri]

Maybe this user likes to watch movies, which pause after each 'take', and need an action to continue the movie. Apparently the difference between a slide deck which is use by a presentation tool, and a movie with added interactivity is not at all understood.

Want a solution to pause after each take/movie clip? Use the On Exit event of each slide to perform two commands:

• Pause
• Disable Play/Pause button

Do not forget to use the On Enter event of all slides to make the Play./Pause button enabled again.