Im using Captivate primarily to create a bunch of quick software demonstrations and publish them internally in HTML5. Our organisation uses chrome as its default browser which I understand doesn’t support autoplay. So when users open a file they are presented with a blank screen with just a play button in the centre and the player controls below. Id like to have some sort of title page that can have an image and some text to display that at least confirms to the user they are looking at the correct tutorial. Any suggestions? Thanks
Some links for reading on this.
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay
Unfortunately, Captivate projects are the collateral damage in this whole “AutoPlay War”.
Believe me – I get it – I don’t like the annoying advertisements that magically play out of nowhere.
Is it fair to suggest that the majority of Captivate users are not creating annoying advertisements that magically play?
I think there is a big difference between reading an article on a website when you are suddenly interrupted by mysterious audio or a pop-up video – that sucks – and actually clicking on a link for which you are expecting a video only to be forced to click again or unmute or something – that sucks too.
That big ugly play button screen… that is Adobe’s contribution to this. That is not Google’s screen.
I mean good grief – if I publish a Captivate project to Captivate Prime – a learning management system with all kinds of text, audio, and video to be expected – every single project requires two clicks to get to what the designer intended…? I think that is dumb. These are not advertisements.
Just look at some of the projects I have posted. No audio or video but you still need to click that big dumb play button. Why should that be blocked by a browser? Remember the Periodic Table I posted? Single slide – no audio or video – just some user initiated animations and state changes. Why should that be autoplay blocked?
Well, it isn’t – that is Adobe’s big play button. That is why we can add a little snippet of code to the index.html file and ignore it because Google doesn’t care in that case. It doesn’t care because it is not part of any browser policy.
But the audio? That Google cares about. That is part of the policy. That is why the user’s project moves forward but the audio doesn’t play. Chrome requires user interaction with the media and will reject code calls to play it until they do. I spent several hours last night reading up on this and have a little better understanding of it now.
I think Adobe added the play button screen for situations like the poster, audiox, has – where audio autoplays when the project loads. That big play button forces interaction with the screen so that everything in the project can autoplay. I think it was well intentioned to avoid issues where things do not work as expected. The problem is that they have forced it upon every project – even ones that don’t need it. I would guess I am not the only one who creates projects with no audio or video. My projects often invite the user to interact anyway. I would suggest as a best practice to create title or introductory slides. I always made them and your workflow addresses that but I did not want to create a title slide for my title slide if you know what I mean.
I just want the ability with a checkbox in the GUI again to disable that play button slide. Until then, I will tweak my index file for as long as that works.
I will post some links in a separate post for some interesting reading a little later.
Hi Greg, Definitely keen to look at modifying the html code to improve the user experience.
Thanks
Adam
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