Best way to create an audio tutorial in app

[jonahgabriel]

I am thinking about creating an option for the user to view a tutorial in my iPhone app that includes an audio component. Essentially, I want to show an image and then have some audio describing what is going on in the image. I would also like pause, rewind, fast forward, play controls so that the user can move though the tutorial at their own pace.

I am thinking that there are a couple of ways to do this:

1) Create a .mov file and load it into UIWebView (since my app can't go into landscape mode). I could have the .mov included in the application package, which would increase the download time of the application, or have the tutorial downloaded the first time the user accesses the help section, but this would require net access.

2) Create an audio file and have it synced up to to image showing and create my own play controls?

Anyone have any suggestions about how to go about this?

[Hero1000]

Originally Posted by jonahgabriel

1) Create a .mov file and load it into UIWebView
2) Create an audio file and have it synced up to to image showing and create my own play controls?

Anyone have any suggestions about how to go about this?

A .mov file would be bad purely because of the size.

Can you clarify is it a group of images with sounds that you want to navigate? Ie. each image has a wav file which plays and the user switches between images?

[jonahgabriel]

Originally Posted by Hero1000

A .mov file would be bad purely because of the size.

Can you clarify is it a group of images with sounds that you want to navigate? Ie. each image has a wav file which plays and the user switches between images?

Yes, that is correct. Essentially each image will have an associated audio file.

[Hero1000]

Ok cool, well what I would do is create an array of the images and also create and array of the audio files and have two buttons forward and back which load the required content from the arrays which updates the view and plays the sound.

[jonahgabriel]

Originally Posted by Hero1000

Ok cool, well what I would do is create an array of the images and also create and array of the audio files and have two buttons forward and back which load the required content from the arrays which updates the view and plays the sound.

That certainly looks like a possible solution. The problem with the parallel array solution is that I still would need to code up my own audio controls. Stop, play and pause wouldn't be an issue, but having a control where the user could drag to fast forward would be much tricker.

Maybe I could create an mp4 file. I am not super up to date on video compression but I seem to remember reading something on how a compressed video file only stores the differences between the different video frames. If this is the case, it seems that my mp4 file would be the size of the static image plus the size of the audio file.