White Screen File Loading Flashes between screens with mp4s/flv files on each screen

[CandyExplosion]

Greetings! 

We have a video driven learning solution with mp4s created in After Effects and pulled into Captivate.  Most of the screens have a 2-3 minute video.  Some modules have 10 screens, one has 45 screens.  Ten modules total.

We know that progressive vs streaming video, length of content, encoding of content, how fast the hosting service can provide the data, the end user's connection speed and the specs of the user's playback device can all affect these file loading issues.  To improve these times, we are taking steps to further compress the mp4s in Adobe Encoder before pulling into Captivate again, but would also like to know if anyone has experienced this same issue and attempted to run it on an Amazon Flash Media server to improve performance.

The client is complaining about the inefficient way Captivate reads the mp4s/flvs as external files and how the solution was a lousy recommendation from the get- go vs Flash.  That there is little to be down with the nightmare.  But our consultant says that with the course structure the way it is, Flash would do no better as Captivate is a derivative of Flash and built in Flex, a spin-off. 

Thank You! 

KickyKookyKaren

[RodWard]

It sounds like your issue is a result of trying to force too much video content down an insufficient end user bandwidth.

The final format of the video file (MP4, F4V, or FLV) is probably going to be less significant than the total number of megabytes of video that you are trying to deliver.  If your client is suggesting that you should have used Flash Vector animation instead of converting everything to video, and that vector animation would have been lighter and faster, then he's right.

Did anyone do any calculations or tests when this project was being scoped out to find out what the actual NON-shared bandwidth was to each end user, and how many megabytes of data they would be required to download? 

Video content can be VERY heavy. It would seem that if you only find out now after the project is nearing completion that you cannot deliver so much video, then maybe your client has a point.