Saturday, September 13, 2008

How I got Moodle and Captivate Flash Playing Nicely

I've been spending a lot of time with Moodle latey and although it is quite powerful and flexible, it doesn't "just work" the first time.

And what I beat my head against this problem for 2-3 hours on Friday, until I finally figured it out by looking at the Apache error logs, was how to get flash software simulations created with Adobe Captivate to render properly and completely within a lesson.

Flash Output from Captivate
When you publish your projects to flash you get a bunch of files like so.
some_training.htm
some_training.swf
some_training_Fullmotion1.swf
some_training_Fullmotion2.swf
some_training_skin.swf
standard.js


Most of the blogs and tutorials I found for using Captivate flash output focused on creating an HTML document that has your skin for your flash content when you Create a Resource but I never got this working. I tried pasting in the output from the ".htm" above into a web page but that didn't work for a number of reasons I won't get into.

Adding them as repository files
I had better luck using the "add a link to a file or web site." When I created a link to a file in the Apache document root it just worked. But the problem is you don't have all the access controls on that content. So anyone that knows the URL can get that content.

So the answer is to upload files to the local file repository within each course. A separate task was to increased the global file upload size and http post size (in my case I did to 8MB)

So I added a link to a file instead so your "location field" will be to the some_training.swf on the local filesystem (and will be accessed with something like http://192.168.25.132/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=24)

Unfortunately a couple of my projects seemed to work with only using some_training.swf but then others were not complete. I would only get audio. Now the red herring was that all of the projects I couldn't get to render properly were browser simulations, which had a much larger screen geometry the previous movies that worked properly.

The Solution
Make sure you add all the "Fullmotion* files" to your file repository although you only need to link to the top flash file.

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