Hi There,
I am working on a project which has quite a lot of videos. The package size is 482MB. When I am testing the course from LMS, there is intermittent buffering, which greatly impacts the learning experience. Any suggestions?
IN general you might want to rethink the idea of including the videos inside the LMS. You might want to use a different software for that. Moreover, most of the time, when material is uploaded into the LMS it needs to be copied over for each section of the course and then you are using much more space. Some LMS systems charge for storage so the cost starts skyrocketing quickly.
The best method we’ve found for compressing our video footage is using YouTube. We upload our files as a private video to Youtube. Wait for the video to process and then redownload it. YouTube’s compression capabilities are far superior to anything I’ve seen come out of Adobe’s Media Encoder. The file sizes are always 1/2 the size of the original uploaded and the bitrates are really small which help speed up the playtime. It does require extra time to process the uploads and then redownload, but the output is well worth the wait.
The size of your video files and for that matter, the resolution of the videos is seldom the issue if you are experiencing buffering. Look at the bitrate (data rate) of your videos. Go to the source files for the videos you are using in your course and right-click on the files themselves. Click on the Details tab to see the Total bitrate. Obviously, the lower this number is the better. Try to think about bitrates like plumbing – it’s not how fast the water flows through the pipes, it’s how much water can flow through the pipe at any given moment.
I just selected three different video files I found on my computer. I right-clicked on each of them and found that they had completely different data rates. The first one is a video of mine that I downloaded from YouTube. It has a total bitrate of 375kbps. This should stream over just about any network with ease. The second one had a total bitrate of 959kbps. This would also be good for eLearning and might produce a better quality video. The third example was 9056kbps. The video quality was excellent but on a congested network, this video might buffer from time to time. All of these videos were 1920 x 1080 resolution.
Adobe Captivate comes with Adobe Media Encoder installed. You can import your videos into Media Encoder and re-encode the videos for a lower bitrate that might provide your learners with a better user experience. For example, I took the video that was 9056kbps and set the output to be 1mbps in the Bitrate Encoding setting. The resulting re-encoded video is still 1920 x 1080 resolution but the file size dropped down to a tenth of the original file size. While there is a noticeable difference when you compare the video quality, the smaller file size still looks really good and no longer would buffer on networks not capable of the higher bitrate.
Contrary to the former SWF output, where everything was loaded at the start, with HTML5 output audio and video need to be loaded On Enter for the slide where it is needed. I cannot give you a fix at all, except to keep the videos as small as possible, to have a quality which is just sufficient. Maybe create smaller video clips.
You didn’t mention the version you are using. Make sure to update to the most recent release in your version. If you are using CP2019, the most recent version for Windows is 11.5.5.553.
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