Video in HTML5 slides got cut off

Problem:
The problem is with exported HTML5 version of the slides. After exporting the slides as html5, there is an issue with video playback within a slide. The video embedded in a slide is forced to stop at the end of a slide (with or without auto-advance of slides) in many cases despite there are parts of it not played yet

Several cases when this happens:

  1. when user pauses the video, but the slide time still goes on, then when user resumes video play, the video will be stopped as soon as slide time hits end of slide
  2. in slow network, the video takes a while to load, but the slide time already continues, so that when slide time hits end of slide, the video will be stopped
  3. when user switches to another browser tab (in Chrome), the video is paused automatically, but apparently the slide time continues. So when the user switches back to this browser tab, the video continues to play, but because slide time is already ahead, the video got stopped as soon as slide time hits end of slide.

ActivePresenter version:
v8.2.1

OS:
windows 10

Notes:
This problem critically breaks the user experience and produced inconsistent results depending on network conditions. Please fix! Thanks!

Hi,

Thanks for reporting the problem.
Please see our comments below:

  1. If you enable playback controls for the video, please disable the auto advance option of the containing slide, so user can decide go to the next slide after viewing the video. You also need to right-click the video on Timeline and select Play to the end of slide.

  2. Some browsers report playback status inaccurately in this case and we are still trying to find best way to address problem. The workaround is extending the slide duration 1 or 2 seconds.

  3. The recent changes in Chrome (and other webkit-based browsers) lead to this problem. It will be fixed it in the next update. We are sorry for this inconvenience.

Regards,

Thanks for your response. That makes sense.

About 1. is there a better way to address this? Requiring all videos to Play to the end of slide removes all the flexibility of embedding the video in the slide - say if my video is 15 seconds long but my slide content is 60 seconds long, I will have to leave the frozen last frame of video on the slide for another 45 seconds, which is utterly awful. Is this issue not technically fixable by your future update?

Also, the near term workaround seems to be - disable playback controls and add 1-2 second slide duration to account for possible network delay of video playback?

Thanks!

Also I wonder why there is no event for “Video playback finished”? Similarly, for other items, why not events for “when a shape/picture/etc. disappears”?

These events will allow quite some flexibility to trigger a series of animations. Thanks again

Hi,

  1. Actually, it is not a bug so it is not fixable. It is impossible to synchronize between the video and the containing slide but still allows viewers interact with the video. However, things will be easier if the “Video playback finished” event is supported (we are working on this and hopefully it will be available soon). Or, you can design the content like the below example (let viewer decide when to stop viewing the video to go to the next part):

VideoPlayback.approj (3.7 MB)

  1. Yes, I mean in the no playback controls case. Otherwise, please use the method in 1)

Regarding “when a shape/picture/etc. disappears”, this is already in our TODO list but we are still thinking about the best way to implement it. Thanks for your suggestion.

Regards,