Screen recordings in Storyline blocked by Google Chrome

I’ve created many courses with try scenes, which leverage screen recordings, without experiencing any difficulties. However, just this past week we received many reports of my course being broken. This was odd to me since it has been functioning perfectly since March 2021. After a lot of troubleshooting, I learned that the issue is due to a recent release of Google Chrome browser, my client’s preferred browser for all of their applications.

There are 255 instances of the following error in the console:

[Intervention] Blocked attempt to create a WebMediaPlayer as there are too many WebMediaPlayers already in existence.

Based on the following chromium forum link (crbug.com/1144736#c27), it appears to be connected to a potential memory leak in MediaHistory and MediaEngagement.

Issue 1144736: Potential memory leak in MediaHistory and MediaEngagement

 

Excerpt from Chromium forum:

To clarify, I'm talking about tearing down the WebMediaPlayer *inside* of an HTMLMediaElement, not tearing down the element itself.

Comment 27 by dalec...@chromium.org on Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 1:11 PM MST Project Member

Yeah I don't think I'd be opposed to blocking CreateWebMediaPlayer() at the platform layer if there are more than N WMP instances outstanding. The RendererWebMediaPlayerDelegate in MediaFactory has this information already, so we should be able to just add a simple conditional in MediaFactory::CreateMediaPlayer() that returns nullptr past the limit. This will result in a "Player load failure: error creating media player" message to the site.

So, essentially Chrome is suppressing the creation of WebMediaPlayer objects which are critical for screen recording features within my course. Thus, my course freezes up on learners. Currently we are instructing all students that for these types of courses which leverage screen recordings, they need to use Mozilla Firefox which is a little annoying since everything else requires the use of Google Chrome.

I've reported this to the Articulate 360 Support team. However, I thought I would give everyone a heads up.