How to fix streaming for my viewers

[KinID]

Hello professionals,

I have been getting a lot of complaints from users watching my training materials on the adobe connect system. We have been using connect to share video training and quizzes in PowerPoint. The problems seem to be with the video portions of the training. the users claim that the videos will either not play at all, play a little before freezing, or be cut short and interrupted by the quizzes. They all say that they are at computers with good connection speed. The most recent incident had a 14mbps download speed and yet could not view a presentation that contained a 720p video.

The videos are externally produced as .mp4's before being added into the PowerPoint presentations via Adobe Presenter. We have tried this method of delivery for videos of 1080p quality all the way down to 480i, and the results seem to be the same. Most people seem to be able to watch without issue, but too many are not able to complete the training.

Of course, everything seems to work just fine here in the office. Our IT department says that our servers are more than capable of handling the load. But we are a state agency in Idaho, and many of our users are accessing the training from far away in the state.

Any help that you can offer would be great. Is there anything that we can do to make these training videos stream more reliably for our viewers? What can adobe connect handle as far as streaming videos? What formats/resolutions should I use to make things work better?

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

It sounds me like a bandwidth issue on your user's end.

Presenter will support FLV or MP4 video (or will convert formats other than those two to FLV). Personally, I find that videos around the 720 X 480 resolution and 800 kbps bit rate seem to work best for my users. Consider that the video plays within a smaller section of the screen, so an HD resolution and bit rate may just be wasted bandwidth consumption.

I've not had any issue using MP4 videos, but it may be worth trying FLV to see if you get a better viewing experience. It is also worth clarifying how Presenter loads, which may allow you to change the setup of your presentation to better leverage the pre-loading function to prevent buffering.

Presenter loads the first three slides while you are seeing the loading screen. So if a video is within the first three slides, it may lead to a long initial load time. Once the first three slides are loaded and it starts playing, Presenter begins pre-loading an additional slide every three seconds. So, if your first three slides are short and the video is on slide 4 or 5, it may not have had time to pre-load the video before the user gets to that slide if they are on a lesser Internet connection. You may find that there is a better viewing experience if you put the video later in the presentation, or have longer slides before the video, to better allow the video to pre-load. Having a lower bit rate video will also help reduce the amount of time needed for pre-loading.

[KinID]

Thanks for the insight!

I'll give FLV a try to see if it helps. And, I'll keep the thread unanswered for now, just in case there are any other thoughts out there.