Playing media with actions

- If you plan on including media in your title, such as audio or a video, you can use actions to control the playback of those media files. That's what we're going to do with our kinetECO new hire orientation project we've been building. If you've skipped to this movie just open up KEOrientation0705. You'll need to import it from the chapter 7 folder of your exercise files. Next we'll go to the marketing chapter, expand it. And from here click the Social Networking page.

You can see all we have is a title and our BlogTour video that we added in an earlier movie. The video itself has its own play bar down below so we can see the controls for playing, progress, making it full screen, volume control etc. But sometimes it's better not to give that much control to your learners or users. And instead offer actions that can be used to start or stop or even pause the video. So that's what we're going to do right now. We'll start by selecting the video itself, which is titled BlogTour.

And with the Properties tab selected go to the controller dropdown, give it a click, and choose None. So we don't want them making it full screen we don't need them pausing or playing from that particular controller. Instead you'll notice there is a play button in the center. But people may not know that they can click again to pause and there's no way to stop it. So, we're gonna provide them with that opportunity by going to the Insert tab. And we're just gonna insert a text block. Give it a click.

We'll double click where it says double click here to add text. And type in something like, click here to Play or Pause video. Like so. Alright now this particular block is much larger than it needs to be. And it's not in the right place so we'll click and drag it down. And we can leave it maybe down here below to the left. So we have our text, you can see it's labeled Text Block 2. I'm gonna click inside there to select it click again to change the text to something more descriptive.

Play/Pause Text. There we go. Now it's time to add the action that allows us to toggle between playing and pausing the video. So we'll go up to the Properties, click the Properties tab. We'll leave it the way it is as far as the name. You can see it's up there. Everything else except we wanna add an action way over here to the right-hand side. Give that a click. And that opens up the Action tab.

So we'll name this, let's do Play or Pause Video. That's the action. Alright so we want to use a mouse click. That's perfect, that's the trigger. Without any delay, what happens when people click this text. Right now you can see the default is No Action at all but click the dropdown, and there is a Media section down near the bottom. Under media we can pause or play. Check it out a little further down we can toggle Play/Pause.

Give that a click. And that applies the action to our only media file on this page, our BlogTour. So when you click the dropdown you'll notice there's nothing else to choose. Let's test it out by pressing F10 on the keyboard or going down to the Run Mode button down at the bottom. And it does say Click here to Play or Pause video. I'm gonna click it to play it, then click again to pause. - Welcome to the kinetECO blog site. Here you'll find a listing-- - There clicking again pauses it.

And you can see there is a play button there. If people are familiar with media files like this you can click here to play and pause as well. - Some of our products and how they're used-- - But with this text people will be sure exactly how to play and pause the video. Now if we wanted to we could add something that would allow them to stop the video. We could add text or maybe we should use a button. We'll talk about using buttons with actions next.