Slide level FLV without Flash 2.0

by admin on August 30, 2006

Hello again!

Sorry for the delay in posting…I have had a serious case of bloggers block and wasn’t able to think of anything to blog about. Well, I was reading a post on the forums today and something someone posted gave me some ideas how I could improve upon the post I made a couple of months ago about adding Slide Level FLV in Articulate Presenter without the use of Flash (Want slide level FLV but don’t have Flash). So I went ahead and made some changes to the files to add some additional functionality based on feedback I have recieved from the previous posting. The new version of these files I am posting allows you to do several things:

Add an FLV video to a slide in Articulate Presenter without using or knowing Flash
Allows the playback controller on the Articulate Presenter player to pause the FLV
Allows the volume controller on the Articulate Presenter player to control the audio of the FLV

I was able to make these changes and by using the Articulate Presenter SDK. If you have not heard of the SDK, and want to find out more, check out the blog post on the Articulate Presenter SDK.

Instructions for use

Download slidevideo20.zip (35 KB)
Open up PowerPoint
Select slide where you want the FLV video
Select Articulate>Insert Flash Movie
Select ‘Display in slide’
Click Next
Select Browse
Browse to and select ’slidevideo_wpause_sound.swf’
Select Next
Select ‘Play Flash movie and slide in sync’
Select ‘Move to next slide when user clicks next’
Click Next
Click Finish
Select Articulate>Publish and publish your presentation
Navigate to the dirctory that you published to
In the root level of your output foler (root level will also contain the player.html file) copy the flv.xml file contained in this zip

Open up the FLV.xml in any text editor such as notepad
Change the source file to match the name of your FLV file
Change the x-location to the position you want the FLV to appear on the X axis. The upper left hand corner of the slide is considered to be an x-position of 0. The farthest right x-position is 720.
Change the y-location to the position you want the FLV to appear on the y axis. The upper left hand corner is a y-position of 0. The farthest botttom y-position is 540.
Save the file so the name matches the slide number name (i.e. if the video is on slide 1 it would be 1.xml)
Copy your FLV into the ‘player’ folder in the output folder
View the output

Your presentation should now launch and your FLV will play in the slide.

Limitations

Only works in Flash Player 8 or later
Slide must be set to ‘Play Flash movie after slide has begun’

Additional Questions?

My email address is posted in the readme file in the download. Please let me know if you have any questions.

If you would like access to the source of the SWF that I have used I can send you the source as long as you are a member of the Articulate Platinum Membership plan. Sorry, can’t send it out to everyone as it exposes a bit of the Articulate API.

{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }

Dave Holzemer September 6, 2006 at 10:48 am: I really like this!

I have a question for you on this too. Is it possible for you to create a player that can play multiple FLA movies on multiple slides.

ie. I’d like to have a movie on slide 3, 5 and 7

thanks
dave
Dave Mozealous September 6, 2006 at 10:54 am: Hello Dave,

Actually this should allow you to do that. You will just need to insert the SWF on whatever slide you want to include the FLV on. As long as you add a new XML file for each slide you should be ok. So in your example insert the swf on slides 3, 5, and 7, then you will need to create a 3.xml, 5.xml, and 7.xml for each one of those slides.
Dave Holzemer September 6, 2006 at 11:48 am: Cool, thanks can’t wait to try this.

Thanks for the info and work on developing this!

dave
Phil September 21, 2006 at 12:06 am: Hi Dave

Thanks for the post. It helps solve some of the problems we had.

I can control the volume but NOT pause or stop the Video.

I do have select Play Flash movie after slide has begun, Start Flash Movie after 0 Second and bot enabled
allow Player… and Set this…

Also i find out, that articulate presenter (i have 5.05 installed) delete the folder. So if you put an “flv” file in it, it will be deleted when you republish the presentation.
Dave Holzemer September 21, 2006 at 6:21 am: Another Question, if you don’t mind. Can this same technique work with articulate presenter pro 4?

I’m thinking that the folder stucture would be a little different though, right?

thanks!
Dave Mozealous September 21, 2006 at 7:45 am: Hey Phil,

You were right. Don’t know what happend but I guess I zipped up the wrong SWF. I have uploaded a new zip file that corrects the issue, so it should now work as expected. Try downloading the files again and see if it works now.

Let me know if you have any problems.
Dave Mozealous September 21, 2006 at 7:47 am: P.S. Phil, I like your website. I especially like the thumbnail pic of the Aritculate Player. Cool way of making links to AP presentations look more engaging.
Dave Mozealous September 21, 2006 at 7:49 am: Hey Dave,

Actually not sure if it will work or not in AP 4. My thinking is that it might, but it has been so long since I used AP4 I can’t tell you for sure either way. Try it out and let us know.
Phil September 25, 2006 at 11:46 pm: Hi Dave

Thanks.
It works know as expected.

P.S.
We are selling Articulate Products and Services in Switzerland. See our blog in German http://www.rapid-eLearning.ch
Leslie May 17, 2007 at 10:58 am: Dave,

This is great – it will come to great use as I don’t have Flash, but have FLV videos I need to incorporate.

Following up on Phil’s post a while back – is there a “fix” for not having to redo the xml files and recopy the FLV files into the Player folder each time you republish?

Thanks,
Leslie
Dave May 17, 2007 at 12:25 pm: Hello Leslie,

Unfortunately I don’t have any fix for that. Whenever you publish from Articulate Presenter it will clear the output folder, so based on the current version of Articulate Presenter I can’t do anything to change that functionality.

Sorry
Leslie May 18, 2007 at 12:51 pm: No big deal – I’m just glad I can use the files without Flash…

Another question – in your instructions, in step 10 you say to select “Play Flash movie and slide in sync”, but then under Limitations, you put that the Slide must be set to “Play Flash movie after slide has begun”. Which one is it?

WHen I choose to play it with the slide in sync, it plays but the seekbar goes for 5 seconds and then says to click next to continue (even though the movie is still playing. When I choose to Play the Flash movie after the slide has begun, the movie starts to play, but then stops when the seek bar gets to the end 5(5 seconds).

What am I doing wrong?
Dave May 22, 2007 at 11:58 am: Hello Leslie,

Actually, I can’t quite remember what I selected when I created this. I think either should work.

What you can do to correct the slide time problem is insert silent audio via the Timeline Audio Editor, and insert enough silence to make the slide time match that of the inserted movie.

When it is set to “play it with the slide in sync” does it not automatically advance after the movie is done?
KJ December 16, 2007 at 10:24 am: Eight 5 minutes Videos…any design tips?

——————————————————————————–

Design Tips &/or Examples Appreciated

I am about to begin working on a WBT to deliver the 8 five minute videos using Articulate/Engage. The videos will be FLV files.

Any design tips or examples for good layouts, navigation etc.?

Requirements:
Users must view all videos to be consider “Complete”
User must be able to exit after 2 videos and return to complete the remaining videos therefore, perhaps bookmarking may be used
.

Any advice will be helpful!
Kim Brown August 15, 2010 at 6:46 am: I have a 3 hour training video broken up in to 8 sub topics. I’m going to convert these segments into flash. With the flash frame # limit how can I link, say, 3 seven minute flash movies to play sequentially in Articulate or Engage? Thanks for your thoughts.
Dave Mozealous August 16, 2010 at 7:39 am: Hey Kim,

If you are using Articulate Studio ‘09 you can use slide level FLV without the need to use this workaround…all you need to do is insert the video. We actually even support MP4 now.

With MP4 and FLV there is no frame limit.

-Dave
Kim Brown August 17, 2010 at 12:05 pm: Dave,
Thanks for the help on the flv frame limit issue. I have another question. I have a number of Articulate Presenter courses with quizzez. I am finding instances where users exit the course, say without passing the quiz and on exiting a child window of the LMS browser is being opened so that I end up with an LMS window with its menu system inside the parent version of the same window. Is there a change I need to make to the configuration.js file to keep this window from spawning? Any thoughts on this? thanks again. (Our lms is a SCORM compliant product called OCCAM7 which we licensed originally to host a course that SAI Global created for us. Now we are hosting our own courses on this bare-bones lms until we are able to upgrade to something a little more substantial (Coursemill perhaps?) (We are a low budget operation obviously). thanks again.
Dave Mozealous August 17, 2010 at 1:41 pm: Hey Kim,

I am not sure I have heard that happening before…have you asked the LMS vendor what is causing it to happen? I hate to be the guy that suggests asking the other party, but I can’t think of anything we are doing that would cause that…

The only real configurable place in our configuration.js that does anything with the exit behavior is this line:
var EXIT_BEHAVIOR = “SCORM_RECOMMENDED”;

You could try changing that to one of the other values:
//used to control window closing behavior on call of ConcedeControl
//Possible Values: SCORM_RECOMMENDED, ALWAYS_CLOSE, ALWAYS_CLOSE_TOP, NOTHING, REDIR_CONTENT_FRAME, LMS_SPECIFIED_REDIRECT

But that is just a serious shot in the dark…

-Dave