Content overview

Informations

• Windows Security Alert on Windows XP
• Supported elements of the internal HTML browser
• Caching
• List of keyboard shortcuts
• Replay of documents is not possible
• Supported input formats
• Supported codecs on video replay
• Usage with Linux

Problems

• Warning message with Pure Screengrabbing Documents in certain situations
• Player doesn't load document
• Random Visible Scrolling does not work well
• No or very low sound
• Player Light crashes upon/after video replay
• Text on the slides appears only as small boxes
• Shortcuts in German
• Video replay stops

Error messages

• Error message "Could not find main class. Program will exit!"
• Error message "The given file (http://...) was not found."
• Error message "EOFException: Unexpected end of ZLIB stream"
• Error message "StreamCorruptedException: InputStream does not contain a serialized object"
• Error message "UnknownHostException" when opening an URL
• Error message "One or more videos could not be loaded" in documents with video
• Error message "The given file was not found"

Question:

If you try to start the LECTURNITY Player on Windows XP you may get the following "Security Alert":

Figure 1: Windows Security Alert upon Player start

Hint:

Please confirm this dialog with "Unblock".

Background:  Upon start the Player checks whether another Player instance is already active. This communication between two players is done through network connections. As these connections are done only locally you can allow them with "Unblock".

The LECTURNITY Player contains an internal HTML browser. It is used for the presentation of the overview page for the CD export. For the creation of the overview page for the CD export, HTML templates are used. When installing LECTURNITY, five verified templates are also installed. They are located under <installation path of LECTURNITY>\Publisher\CD Templates (often c:\Programme\Lecturnity Suite\Publisher\CD Templates). If you adapt these templates or create new ones, then please consider the following properties of the internal HTML browser:

• Any scripting elements (JavaScript, and others) and Plugins (Flash, Real, etc.) are not supported.
• Frames and tables are supported. However, with regard to the table please keep in mind that percentages in width and height might cause problems. Comments within the <table> tags, but outside the <td> tags are problematic as well.
• As image formats, GIF, JPG and PNG are supported. With PNG images the page might build up slowly.

Question:

What does the menu entry "Extras -> Cache control" mean? What is caching?

Solution:

The caching mechanism allows you to load and view a document even if it is on a storage media which is too slow for uninterrupted replay (e.g. CD or network). In order to achieve this a speed check is performed each time you load a document. If the access seems to be too slow you get the opportunity to cache your document. That means it will be copied to your local harddrive and is started from there.

The menu entry "Extras -> Cache control" enables you to configure certain aspects of this caching mechanism. Some of them are:

• the location where copied documents will be stored,
• the maximum storage space that can be used by the cache and
• a list of the current content of the cache.

But normally you shouldn't come into contact with this feature.

Hint:

Opening a document with the menu entry "File -> Open URL ..." also uses this cache mechanism: The given file will be copied to the cache automatically before replay.

The keyboard shortcuts that are available in the LECTURNITY Player are mostly listed behind their respective menu entries. These are:

The replay of documents with the Player is restricted in two ways:

• The Player of a Campus or Enterprise version of LECTURNITY cannot replay documents created with an Evaluation version.
• Documents created with an Enterprise version cannot be replayed with a Player of a Campus version.

In both cases the following message is displayed: "This LECTURNITY Presentation Document cannot be replayed by this Player version."

The LECTURNITY Player supports the following formats/files:

• LECTURNITY Recording Document (LRD): This file and several other are created by the LECTURNITY Assistant upon recording. You can view these files with the Player in order to preview your recorded document. However it is not recommended for redistribution (see LPD).
• LECTURNITY Presentation Document (LPD): This file is produced by the LECTURNITY Publisher. It combines and compresses the files of an LRD (see above). Furthermore you can embed certain viable additions, like thumbnails or fonts in this file. And last but not least it protects your data against later modifications. This file is normally used for redistribution, e.g. on a CD or over a LAN.

The image content contained in a video (or Screengrabbing clip) is normally compressed with the help of a video codec. The LECTURNITY Player supports most of the currently available ones. Some prominent examples are:

• LSGC:
  The LECTURNITY Screengrabbing Codec is delivered and installed with every version of LECTURNITY and of the LECTURNITY Player. This codec is recommended for the recording of Screengrabbing clips.
• IV50:
  The Indeo Video 5 codec is recommended as compressor of normal videos as it is already installed on most systems.
• DIVX:
  The DivX Video codec is also a good choice for a normal video. However, you should take into consideration that it isn't installed on most systems. Please note that there may occur problems with the DivX 6.0 codec with LECTURNITY versions prior to and including version 1.7.0.p4.

Unfortunately the use of some of the codecs leads to problems with the replay in the Player. In this case you will normally get a warning message with "javax.media.CannotRealizeException". Codecs leading to problems are for example:

• MSVC:
  In this case the video picture is not drawn properly. Often a large part of the video area remains black.
• XVID:
  Upon usage of this codec the Player crashes when being closed or when trying to load another document.
• MPG4:
  Normally the Player cannot find and use this codec without a prior codec installation. The Windows Media Player however can replay such videos as the respective codec is integrated in the software.

The LECTURNITY Player 1.6.0 makes a limited use under Linux possible. The replay of videos in LECTURNITY Presentation Documents under Linux, however, is usually not possible due to the lack of appropriate video codecs.

Requirements

The following Java-Packages have to be installed:

• Java Runtime Environment Version 1.3 or higher
• Java Media Framework Version 2.1.1 or higher (for video replay when appropriate codecs are available)

Start from Console or Shell

The LECTURNITY Player is started with the following command:
java -jar player.jar <documentname.lpd>

Start from Netscape

In Netscape, you can link the LECTURNITY Presentation Documents with the Player directly: to do so, select in the menu Edit -> Preferences "Navigator - Applications" and click on New ..... Fill in the dialog which is displayed as described below:

Figure 2: Dialog for the mime type LPD

Hint: Enter player.jar together with the complete path: <path>/player.jar

Linux is not officially supported by LECTURNITY.

Question:

If a Pure Screengrabbing Document erroneously includes an Accompanying Video, its opening in the Player results in a warning message.

Solution:

In LECTURNITY 2.0.p3 accompanying video is not allowed in Pure Screengrabbing Documents anymore.

Question:

Why does the LECTURNITY Player not load my document?

Solution:

If the Player refuses to load a document without any error messages there are several possibilities:

• Maybe one of the files (e.g. the LMD file) was altered with a text editor and saved in the Unicode encoding (two bytes per character). In this case the Player displays the progress bar but doesn't do anything else.

Question:

How come I can sometimes navigate in my document only very slowly?

Solution:

You can navigate in your document by moving the knob on the scroll bar to the left and right. This can be slow due to one or more of the following reasons:

• Usage of a video:
  If your document contains a video or some Screengrabbing clips it is possible that the scrolling becomes slow. This is due to the fact that displaying a video is a much more complicated task than only showing slides. You can find more information on this subject in the Video FAQ.
• Many and/or large images:
  Documents that contain many and/or large images possibly slow down the random visible scrolling or the slide change. The reason is the enormous (storage) size these images need for the internal processing. A reasonable limit for avoiding this case would be around 20 images of a size of 800×600 (about 10 million pixels). However, this can only be influenced in the LECTURNITY Assistant before or during the recording.

If during replay in the LECTURNITY Player no or just a very low sound can be heard, please check the volume control of your Windows system. The audio control is found in the taskbar in the lower right, in most cases characterized by the speaker symbol.

Figure 4: The speaker symbol in the system tray

By clicking twice on the symbol, the window with the sound settings opens. The decisive items for the sound in the LECTURNITY Player are the "Volume" and "Wave" controls.

The "Wave" control is influenced by the RealMedia Player and Windows Media Player. If you change the volume in one of these Players, the "Wave" control and thus the volume in the LECTURNITY Player will also be changed.

Question:

When you replay a document which contains Screengrabbing clips (videos) it might happen that the Player crashes: the program and thus its window just vanish. However, this is only the case if you are using a "Player Light" package.

Solution:

You may consider using a Player package which already has a version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) included. The above problem doesn't occur with such a version. You can download a Campus version of the Player in our Download Center. Choose a version "with Java".

In case of some special symbol fonts it may be possible that their characters are displayed in the Player as small boxes although the Assistant displays them correctly. All standard symbol fonts (Webdings, Wingdings, Symbol, Marlett), however, are supported by the Player and are displayed correctly.

Question:

I use an English version of LECTURNITY. However some of the texts and all shortcuts are displayed in German. Why is that?

Solution:

In case you use an English LECTURNITY version together with a German operating system the shortcuts in the menus and some of the dialogs will be displayed with German texts. This problem arises as these functions are provided directly by the (German) operating system. The problem does however not only affect LECTURNITY alone but all programs whose language does not match that of the operating system.

Question:

Why does the video replay stop for some documents?
If a LECTURNITY document contains a video file with more than 1 GB the part being larger than 1 GB is not displayed in the Player. 

Solution:

Such a document is likely to be produced with the Editor. There the video settings (compression) can be changed and a video file with less than 1 GB can be created in the exported document.

Figure 4: Error message: "Could not find main class. Program will exit!"

Question:

The error message "Java Virtual Machine Launcher: Could not find main class. Program will exit!" appears upon the start of the Player or Publisher if there is any of the following three characters in the path to these programs: % ! #
This may be the case if you

• either have LECTURNITY installed in a directory with such a name or
• have put a cd image in a directory with such a name.

Solution:

You can deinstall LECTURNITY and install it in another directory or simple rename the respective directory in the cd image case.

Question:

I try to open a document from the internet with the menu entry "Open URL...". However this attempt fails with the error message "The given file (http://...) was not found.". What is going wrong?

Lösung:
Most likely you are using the LECTURNITY Player with Linux. Here the menu entry "Open URL..." is unfortunately not supported. However you can download this file normally (i.e. with a web browser) and then load it with "File -> Open...".

Be aware that even if this menu entry works (i.e. with Windows) it will only download the given file to the local cache and then open it from there.

Question:

When opening an (LPD-) document the dialog with the error message mentioned above appears. The document is subsequently not loaded. Why does that happen?
A probable reason might be that this document (the file) has not been transmitted completely (e.g. from the Internet). The file is not complete as the end is missing.

Solution:

Download the document anew and try to open it with the Player again.

Question:

When trying to open an (LPD-) document the above mentioned error message appears. The document cannot be opened. What is the reason for this?
The message comes up when the document is transmitted from an incorrectly configured Web server (http server): when a document (the file) is transmitted in text mode (Mime Type text/plain), Netscape under Windows automatically converts all line breaks into the DOS format. However, since LPD files are binary files, they are destroyed by this conversion.

Solution:

Inform the administrator of the Web server that the Mime Type for LPD files has to be set to application/octetstream (binary file). As an alternative, use another browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) for the download of the LPD file; this program does not convert line breaks. Unfortunately, there is no possibility of restoring the right state of the document after the conversion.

When trying to open an LPD file on a Web-Server with the Player (with the menu entry File -> Open URL...), please take care that the URL does not contain any backslashes ('\'), e. g. if you enter the address by hand. Otherwise you will receive the error message: "An error occurred during copying: UnknownHostException".

When a document contains a video or Screengrabbing clips it is possible that one of these videos cannot be loaded. You'll then normally receive an error message "One or more videos could not be loaded. javax.media.CannotRealizeException. Maybe a necessary video codec is not installed."
The most common reason for this behavior is that the respective codec is actually not installed. Other programs on this computer cannot replay this video either. One special case however is the Microsoft MPEG-4 Codec (MPG4). The Windows Media Player is able to replay such videos on any system because the necessary code is integrated. The LECTURNITY Player however cannot replay these videos.

Question:

What could be the reason for the error message "The given file was not found"?

Solution:

Besides the obvious reason that the file really does not exist (maybe because a network drive is not connected) there is also the reason that the file name or its path contains characters from another language that are not part of the current codepage
For example files with the czech symbols ř (r with Caron) or ů (u with ring above) cannot be opened by a Player running on a German version of Windows.
This problem also appears in the fact that such files are not displayed in the file dialog for opening files in the Player.