Slow Flash and Videos

[AHwalek]

Hello,
I'm making a course that's going to be distributed by CD or taken off a network drive. Since a lot of Flash and FLV videos are in the course I figured it would make the most sense to publish it to HTML. When I publish to HTML and come to the pages with Flash or a video they run reallly slow. To the point of unwatchable.

I thought it might be because it was published to html so I gave the single file Lectora output a try and got the same slowness.

The movies in the video are large (up to 10 MB) but they're stored locally so it shouldn't be an issue.

Any idea what's goin on here?

Thanks,
Tony

[rhall01]

It sounds more like a computer issue than anything else. Are you running this from a web server or publishing to HTML and running locally? When you publish to .exe do you experience the same slowness? Try running from a different machine. I use .flv and .swf files quite often, of various sizes, and it's never been the size of the file that has changed the speed of playback.

[lrichmtg]

First, I'd try to isolate the issue.

You mentioned you're using swf and flv files in the same course. Are you finding that one type slows down while another type doesn't? Are there certain files that consistently error? If this is the case, you might check the bit rate of the video/audio. Depending on the file, you can have issues with audio sounding like a chipmunk or like an ogre once imported into Flash if the bit rate is incompatible.

Another test is to try "dragging" the swfs into a blank browser window and play them from there to isolate a desktop issue. If all files of each type are consistently buggy on some machines, but not others, take a look at the system. It could be hardware, software, or settings.

Unless you're doing a lot of programming using Flash/Lectora communication, Lectora shouldn't be the cause of the slow files, but good troubleshooting can get you close to that root cause and allow you to focus on solutions.