Adding Audio and Video to your iBooks Widget

Audio

Tumult Hype fully supports audio actions so you can play and stop audio in response to scene events, touch and mouse events, and at specific points in time using timeline actions.

In contrast to Mobile Safari, iBooks allows you to play audio without user interaction – audio can be set to play ‘On Scene Load’ or as a Timeline Action.

For more information, please visit the audio & video section of our documentation. Please note that a user action (a physical tap) is required to play audio in iBooks author widgets. Audio played ‘On Scene Load’, ‘On Layout Load’, or as a Timeline Action will not play.

iBooks requires the .m4a (AAC) format. Permute is a good tool for converting audio into this format on the Mac.

Video

For general info about adding video to Tumult Hype documents, please see the Audio & Video chapter of our documentation. iBooks prefers videos encoded in the MP4 format. If you are creating content targeted only for an iOS device, you will only need this one format.

If you have not yet encoded your video into MP4, we heartily recommend using ‘Miro Video Encoder’.

Hosted Videos

If you have a .mp4 video you’d like to show within an HTML widget, you’ll need to reference it using a standard video embed code. This is a good way to reduce the size of your HTML widget, but it will require that your readers are online when viewing your content.

<video width="400" height="280" controls="controls">
<source src="http://site.com/video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

You can also embed a Youtube or Vimeo embed code within the inner HTML of a box. If you include this in an iBook, your reader will need to be online to access it. When Tumult Hype exports are created, a property is automatically added to your .wdgt file so that the widget may access the Internet.

Please see this article for info on embedding a Youtube or Vimeo video.

Autoplaying Videos

Videos can be set to autoplay by checking ‘Autoplay’ in the element inspector for the video. When the scene containing the video appears in iBooks (even if it is the first scene) it will autoplay the video. This behavior sometimes changes in iBooks, so please test extensively.

ibooks-video.zip (11.5 MB)

Custom Video / Audio Controls

For tips on creating custom pause and play buttons, please see this article. Most HTML5 video functions are available within iBooks. Read this article on MDN to learn what’s possible.

Known Issues

Video & Audio files that have a space or foreign characters in their name sometimes do not work. We recommend using filenames like video1.mp4. The same goes for the name of your widget during export. It’s best to use simple names like mywidget or Jupiter4 when exporting.

1 Like

13 posts were split to a new topic: Autoplaying Audio in iBooks ‘On Load’