How do you control playback of an FLV in Captivate so it is controlled by the main playbar navigation or your own pause / play button?
I have seen this question many times but hadn’t really taken the time to look into it since I never had that need in my courses – until today that is.
Basically what I needed to do was to add a custom play / pause button created in Adobe Flash to a Adobe Captivate project. The project use navigation built from various buttons as opposed to projects using the standard playbar. The problem was that when you paused the slide then the FLV video on that particular slide continued to play. First I thought it was because the project used a custom navigation so I switched on the playbar but the problem remained.
The solution:
In the Options tab of your Flash Video in Captivate set the Display for property to duration of video. Also select Synchronize with project.
You probably also want to set it to Autoplay and remove the skin in the Flash Video tab.
On you slide you need to extend the slide timeline to the same duration as your video.
This will allow you to pause / resume the FLV video using the standard playbar or a custom button.
Please note that this is probably only a viable solution if your FLV movies are relatively short. I wouldn’t use this for videos longer than a couple of minutes since you would probably encounter some performance issues.
6 Comments
Hi
Do you know if this will help a related problem/ We have a wrapper for our CP files developed in Flash rather than using the CP toc. When we try to play video in a CP slide and jump from it to a different CP file while the video is playing, the previous video doesn’t stop playing.
I don’t think we ever tried the Synchronize with Project option. Is this the silver bullet?
@Jennifer it likely is due to not selecting “Synchronize with project” in your settings.
However, one other word of caution, Michael (and maybe Jennifer too) that I had problems when using the “duration of video” for my display for setting. If I was playing my flv in slide 1 using this setting, then when Captivate went to slide 2 the flv may have stopped playing but the video window was stuck on the slide (and all subsequent slides).
The fix for this issue I found was to change the display for setting to “specific time,” then just make sure to have it last on the slide for the length of the video. For instance, if your video is 45 seconds then make sure it lasts on the timeline for that length of time (or longer if you want to be safe).
FYI, this was in Captivate 3, so not sure if it changed in Captivate 4.
@ Jennifer – it wouldn’t hurt to try this setting, but as Danny wrote it probably isn’t the reason why you are experiencing the problems. If it should work please let us know ;o)
@ Danny – thx for the comment and tip about “duration of project”. I didn’t experience any problems in CP4 so far, but it never hurts to be on the safe side.
Hello,
We have this issue with an 8 minute long flv in 1 slide of a CP4 project. This slide also contains images and text that are timed to match what is being described in the flv. We want to control the flv and the slide elements with the pause/play button in the skin. When we select the options you describe above, we run into the performance issues you also mention (the video gets choppy and skips). Do you have any suggestions to use with a longer flv file?
Thanks for your help.
@Tara – I don’t really have any other suggestions to help you other than to upgrade to Captivate 5. That way you can insert it as “Slide Video” which will make it work as you are describing.
/Michael
@Michael
Thank you – we’ll give that a try.