MadCap Software Forums

I have been looking to using Mimic to upgrade our multimedia tutorials, formerly created in DemoShield. I can get all of the resources into Mimic (bitmaps, MP3s, etc), and I finally got them all into order, but am having problems once the Flash output is created.

Everything plays fine, however the Pause function does not pause the video. It only pauses the MP3 file playing immediately, and stops the video once the current frame is done. This puts the video out of sync with the audio once it resumes. This is bad.

I tried adding in my own pause function using the standard Javascript StopPlay() function, but it was ignored.

Is there a way to modify this so it works properly? It looks like the Silverlight output works better, but we'd prefer to not have to have all of our users install a relatively new multimedia player.

For what its worth, we are compiling all of the HTML and SWF (or silverlight) files into a CHM for distribution, in case that helps with how to go about things. Thanks!

What you could do is split the mp3 so that each frame has its own file. I am not entirely sure if that is possible in Mimic, but I thought I mention it. It is not ideal, but at least video and audio are in sync starting with the next frame, or at least that is the idea.
I recommend you file a bug report here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

JasonSTI wrote:For what its worth, we are compiling all of the HTML and SWF (or silverlight) files into a CHM for distribution, in case that helps with how to go about things. Thanks!

How are you doing this?

RamonS wrote:What you could do is split the mp3 so that each frame has its own file.

That's what we currently have; each MP3 is a paragraph or two of procedural steps, and each MP3 is the background sound of a frame. However, the animation on the frame is timed to match the description in the MP3, so pausing the sound without pausing the frame throws that frame out of sync. It "fixes" itself between frames, but its... clunky.

For the CHM, we are using Flare. There is a main contents page, with a mirror in the ToC, that opens the pages pulled over from Mimic. Its not really ideal, since there is some issues with the output HTM from Mimic, but I'll probably eventally make my own page in Flare and just include the SWF (or XAML, etc) within the project for compiling.

So judging from the response, it looks like there is no way to pause the entire frame in Flash? If thats the case, we'll have to use Silverlight. ugh

Hi Jason,

I was able to reproduce the issue, for this reason I logged it as a bug. The current bug number is: 27217. Hopefully, this issue will be addressed in the next version of Mimic

Thank you for your feedback,


Cheers