Digital Workshop

Greetings to all

i'm working for an MM company in Munich and new here. Following Problem: I've created an MM-CD with OPUS PRO 5.5 XE which should also serve as a web-publication. The most things went fine, but one problem remains.

During loading large videos in the publication it is necessary to hold the Visitor "on the hook" with some kind of Text as "please be patient, loading video..." or so. Unfortunately i find no possibility to prearrange the display-order of items, being located in the chapter, so that this information-text is displayed before the loading-process freezes the whole Screen for a while.

Has anyone a hint ? Thanks in forehand.

Morning Zebulon,

and welcome to the forum. I'm not sure if this is what you're hoping to achieve but you can set the show delay and hide times under the general tab.

This allows you to show a text box containing "please wait" before showing other objects. There are also various other ways of doing this including using time lines and adding actions that require the user to click a "confirm" before the video shows.

Mack

There is some loading process (i suppose that are the four videos the chapter contains) and it is not possible to controll which elements get displayed BEFORE and which AFTER this loading process. After the loading process, all missing items get displayed immediately.


Thanks Mackavi for your advise. I tried this, but it doesn't really help. In fact the situation is now as follows:

Items which appeared previosely before loading large videos at first on screen, now - after i delayed there visibility at 0.1 secs - appeared together with the "please be patient, loading video..." textelement (which is NOT initially hidden and should therefore appear at once) AFTER the loading process of videos, leaving the message useless.

No "preload ressources" action of videos is used.

The only item now which gets displayed before freezin' while loding the large video contents, is the defined background image in the page properties. I maybe can use this as workaround, if there is no other way.

Unfortunately video handling in the web-publications is very bad and involving much delays and it seems not to be the loading process which causes this. In reality it are the the show/hide/pause-/play video actions, which in the standard publication works without any perceptible delays but in the web publication each action causes delayes of several secs . The "stop an reset video" action even freezes the web-publication completely while in the standard publication it works also fine. This brought me in trouble and forced me to set up the web publication in an other way seeking workarounds.

I'm afraid without seeing this in action it's a little difficult to understand the problem.

There is also lots and lots of information on using video on this forum. You can generally produce good, if not great results. I did publish an example of web-based video control that we (Interaktiv) had written for a custom some while back and it's still on-line:

http://www.interaktiv.co.uk/plexus/vcr/VCR.htm

If you can provide a link to your web publication, I'm sure those on the forum that use video will have a look and make suggestions.

Mack

When OPUS goes from one Page to a second Page which has Video Objects, it first loads the MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, AVI, etc files, THEN it displays the Page. This can cause a long delay if you have large video files, or multiple videos on a single Page.

There are several ways to solve this. The simplest way is to create a Page which has NO videos, but Buttons to select a video. Each Button then directs you to an identical looking Page with a single video. By the way, use MPEG-1 videos for the best, fastest results. You can slightly stretch them to make them larger than their default size without much picture loss. This solution creates many video Pages instead of a nice, neat single Page, but it will solve the delay problem.

A second, more complex solution involves using a Variable instead of an actual video file name. Create a Variable called "Video". In your Video Object, use this Variable instead of a file name. Now when you call this Page, there's nothing to load, so the Page will immediately appear. Each selection Button on this Page needs to have two Actions: 1) a "Set Variable" (Programming -> Variables -> Set Variable) line. It will look like this: <Video> = "Video_1". An alternative is a single line of Script (which reads: Video = "Video_1").

Go to your Publication -> Properties -> Additional Resources. Do an Add and select your first video file. Click "Alias" at the bottom of this window, and give it the name "Video_1" (no quotes). OPUS will automatically load those videos into its executable "wrapper" when you Publish (unless you are using WMV files, in which case it will change their names and place them in the Publication sub-directory).

2) The second Action line under your Left Mouse Click Trigger will be to Play Video 1 (or whatever your number). This solution works nicely if you also have Pause, Play, Forward, Rewind, Stop Buttons for your Video Object. You ONLY need to have one set of controls. The video file changes whenever you click a new selection Button.

@mackavi,

it is not possible to publish the content of the Site before a special publishing date. The customer wouldn't agree.

Hello demofred,

thanks for your extensive help. Your post explains the causales of the trouble i have with those videos very well. Makes really sense.

In the primordial variant of my standard publication I have four videos, which gets superimposed respectively by an adequate "mouse over" trigger. After taking this as web publishing, the "mouse over" trigger is so much delayed, that I replaced the video by a still-image first. The still image gets now replaced by the correlative video if the user pushs this trigger so handling of the page is fine and an delay appears not until the user do so. the delay which now reappears seems ok if the users gets an appropriate advice. In the currently variant i have merded this advice with the background image. This works and is now a good workaround but i try your suggestion to use a variable instead the Video as an alias. sounds good. I report later.

The question is why this happens in the web publication only and even this publicaton runs really over the web. In the local test of web publication the first variant with four videos as "mouseover show-actions" works fine as well. Also curious is the fact that nevertheless some items of the page appears before loading of videos begins but you can't control it.