Many of our eLearning projects involve importing Captivate files into another Flash file, which usually serves as a wrapper file for the course that contains navigation. Recently I went looking for a way to better control the Captivate files from our custom Flash file and found a great list of Captivate 3 variables for playback control which I’ve copied below. This list can also be found in the Captivate 3 Live Docs.

rdcmndPrevious = 1: Go to previous slide.
rdcmndNextSlide = 1: Go to next slide.
rdcmndPause = 1: Pause the project.
rdcmndResume = 1: Resume showing a paused project.
rdcmndRewindAndStop = 1: Rewind and stop the project.
rdcmndRewindAndPlay = 1: Rewind and play the project.
rdcmndGotoFrame: Go to a specific frame.
rdcmndExit = 1: Exit.
rdcmndInfo: Display the information window (in Captivate 2 this variable is rdcmdInfodisplay).
rdinfoFrameCount: Total number of frames in the project (this is not the number of frames in the main Timeline, but the sum of all slide frames)
rdinfoSlidesInProject: Number of slides in the project (including hidden slides)
rdinfoCurrentFrame: Current frame
rdinfoCurrentSlide: Slide currently playing (zero based)
rdinfoSlideCount: Number of slides in the project (not including hidden slides)
rdIsMainMovie: Can be used to identify whether the SWF corresponds to the main Adobe Captivate project

According to Matt Maxwell’s blog post “Controlling an Imported Captivate Movie” there are three additional variables not published in the Adobe Captivate Live Docs, and those three are listed below.

rdcmndHidePlaybar: Used to hide or show the playbar 1= hide 0=show
rdcmndCC: Used to show or hide Closed Captions 1= show 0=hide
rdcmndMute: Used to mute or unmute the audio 1= mute 0=unmute

Tags: Captivate

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Developer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.