FAQs & Troubleshooting

Yes! Play from here is your friend. You can find it near the top of the Sidebar for every island and tab, just under Name and Description.

When you have published your story, there’s a Public URL for every island – you can find it just next to ‘Play from here’ in the sidebar. This is a link to that specific island, so you can provide links that let viewers jump straight to an island.

This lets you share an individual island on social media, or make a list of links on a web page or create a playable visual map of your story (see our example here)

Yes. To open the preview in a new tab matching the published player view:

Windows: Ctrl+click on “Play” or Right click “Play” and choose Open in New Tab from the menu

Mac: Command+click on “Play” or Ctrl+click and choose Open in New Tab from the menu

Mobile: Hold your finger on “Play” until options appear and then choose Open in New Tab

Tick ‘Pause at end‘ in the styling section in the sidebar (see picture).

This will freeze frame on the last frame of the video file you upload, and wait for the user to make a choice.

Another way to do this is to create a separate ‘menu screen‘ with a still or moving image:

• To make a still image menu, create a separate island for the menu, and upload a still image as the island’s Poster Image.
• To make a moving image menu, create a separate island for the menu, and upload a video to it. Then make one of the island’s choices to loop back to the start of the same island itself, set it as default, and hide that choice by ticking “Hide” next to its onscreen text field. The island will then loop until someone makes one of the other choices.

A default choice is required for validation, but the default field can’t currently be edited on External URL choices. Workaround: add a second choice, leave it unlinked, mark it as default, and tick the Hide checkbox so viewers don’t see it.

If you have any problems, let us know at support@stornaway.io

Yes, depending on account level. You can copy an island keeping all branching paths, content, and game logic intact. You can later replace the media if you need.

Linking to another Stornaway project from inside one currently needs a different subdomain. If your main project uses player.stornaway.io, button links to other Stornaway videos should use studio.stornaway.io. Also, replacing ‘watch’ with ’embed’ gives a cleaner embedded player. Example: change https://player.stornaway.io/watch/abcd1234 to https://studio.stornaway.io/embed/abcd1234.

Yes – each button inside the menu can link to a new Island, an external link, or jump to a specific time in the current Island or a different one. That makes menus ideal for chapter navigation.

No. Build it once, then duplicate the Island. Your menu travels with the duplicate, so you can reuse it across your whole project without starting from scratch each time.

Use 0m0s format (for example, 1m30s) in the “Pause playback at specific times” field, under Settings and styles for all buttons.

Yes. You can add multiple pause times to a single Island, so you can punctuate a longer clip with several reflection or decision moments.

In the sidebar’s ‘Links To’ dropdown, choose External URL. Paste the link and tick ‘open in another tab’ if needed (recommended for embedded projects). Any URL works – web pages, PDFs, social profiles, mailto: links, or e-commerce add-to-cart URLs (e.g. Shopify). If you want to keep your viewer in your project, check out Stornaway Voyager. This allows you to embed other websites inside your Stornaway project.

Watch our tutorial video for full details on this.

Use the Stornaway Design Editor to make your buttons completely transparent – when used in combination with custom button sizes and custom button positions, you can place an invisiable, clickable hotspot anyone on the player.

The Design Editor allows you to have different settings for hover and clicked buttons. Top tip: Place your buttons before you make them transparent.

Absolutely. Stornaway’s analytics and CSV export have been thoughtfully designed to make reporting as straightforward as possible – including use with AI and LLM tools. The data is structured and clearly labelled so that it can be fed directly into an LLM or reporting workflow with minimal preparation. Whether you’re generating summaries, identifying viewer drop-off patterns, or building custom reports, the export gives you everything you need in a clean, accessible format to get meaningful insights quickly.

Multiple destinations:

• Stornaway’s hosted player or embedded on your own site
• LMS platforms via SCORM (tracks completion, score, pass/fail, interactions)
• PowerPoint (via Microsoft’s Web Viewer Add-in)
• Compatible VOD platforms (integrations ongoing -contact for details)

In the Export page, after you have clicked “Publish”, you will see a button marked “View Your Published Story”, which is linked to the URL for your project – clicking it will open the page with your project’s video player, starting from your Start Island. Copy the link to this page to share with anyone.

Like a YouTube or Vimeo embed. ‘Enable Embedding’ is ticked by default at publish time. After publishing, you’ll automatically get an embeded code that you can copy and paste. Note: the embed code only shows for logged-in collaborators on the project.

Absolutely! This is the embed code for the Getting Started video:

<div style=”position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;”><iframe style=”width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0;” src=”https://player.stornaway.io/embed/fb8e6c2b” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen”></iframe></div>

Watermark: This is a visible Stornaway logo that appears directly over the video content itself (top left corner).

See the image below as an example.

To remove our watermark in your projects you can upgrade to our pro plan here.

Whitelabel: This feature allows you to remove all Stornaway branding from your project, including the Stornaway logo that would normally appear in the player controls (in the bottom-right corner) as shown on the image below.

You are able to do this with our enterprise plan. Get in touch here if you’d like this option.

Premium users get these controls in Settings → Edit Project — change player-control colours and toggle off the bottom-right logo. Separate from the top-left watermark, which only shows for Trial/Free accounts and disappears on any paid subscription.

Sharing the story: copy the public player URL (e.g. https://player.stornaway.io/watch/XXXXXXXX) and paste into Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Twitter and LinkedIn play inline; Facebook links or opens in an overlay. Instagram requires ‘link in bio’ (unless you share as a story)

Interactive videos can’t be exported as a single video file – they’re a collection of MP4s linked by a playlist and code, more like an app than a video. Delivered via the Stornaway web/mobile player, shareable by URL or embed.

Each island has its own specific public URL

In the Sidebar for each Island, you will also see a link to the Public URL for each individual Island variant. You can share this to share each Island, letting your audience jump right into the middle of your story. You can share these as links in social, or as a chapter list on a website, or find more creative uses for them…

For example, you can see here how a link from each Island was used to make a playable clickable map of Life Moves Pretty Fast, which lets you jump into any part of the story – just click any location to start from there.

Click to open the playable map in a new tab

Apple restricts web apps from using fullscreen mode on iPhone. Since the Stornaway player is an interactive web app (not a standard video using Apple’s native player), the button is intentionally hidden on iPhone. Fullscreen still works as expected on desktop, Android, and iPad. As workarounds, we recommend designing the embedded player to fill as much of the screen as possible, or using a modal/”lightbox” player.

If you pause or cancel, the project stays viewable in your Story Map and Preview player but is no longer viewable via the Stornaway player or any embeds. Monthly/annual plans can be upgraded or downgraded freely.

Bandwidth here means data transferred when streaming the video to viewers — more bandwidth used = more people watching. Stornaway includes high-quality, ad-free hosting and streaming. Benchmark: a short interactive piece could be played ~100,000 times within a 1TB Studio allowance (bandwidth measures actual watch time, not raw clicks). 99% of creators never hit their limit; you’ll get a heads-up before issues arise. For very large audiences, please contact us for tailored options.

Yes – any paid plan removes the top-left Stornaway watermark.

The smaller bottom-right player-controls logo is removed at the Premium plan level or Enterprise.

We’re sorry to hear you go. To cancel your rolling subscription, head to your account subscription settings and click the “unsubscribe” button.

First of all, what do the Pros use?

The top professional video editing applications for film, tv and video production are Adobe Premiere (and After Effects for graphics), Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro (FCP). We have lots of users editing Stornaway projects with these. They all have huge feature sets, steep learning curves, and are powerful beasts. Adobe and Avid have pro subscription prices and FCP has a one-off cost of $300. The free Davinci Resolve is coming up fast as a great free pro editor, since its long history as a color-grading application, but is still quite complicated to use in comparison to those listed below.

We also have an Adobe Premiere and After Effects panel in beta, which opens your Stornaway story map inside your editing application, letting you playtest your story while you edit. Let us know if you’d like to use it.

For everyone else…

We don’t recommend these 4 to most people – they’re over complicated for simple editing and beginners.

It’s much easier and more fun to do (and learn) the basics using these:

Desktop computer applications:

Mac: iMovie or Adobe Rush

PC: Adobe Rush or Vegas

Mobile apps:

Capcut (free – popular with TikTokers and YouTubers) or LumaTouch (more powerful at $30) or iMovie on iPhone and iPad ($5).

Web browser editors (like Stornaway):

Adobe CC Express, Canva or Veed.io

We link to the last 3 from our Upload panel in the app. We discuss their pros and cons a little bit in the section above, and recommend that you try them out for use with Stornaway.

What to choose and how to learn

There are amazing online tutorials on YouTube for all of them. Pick one from the list above that seems right for your device and budget, and try it out – or search on YouTube for tutorials to see if you like the look and feel of it.

Let us know what you prefer to use, and how you get on – or help other Stornaway users by sharing your experiences and expertise on social media.

For regular videos (not 360 or images), we recommend the following settings when you export from your video editor:

File size:
We have a maximum file size of 4GB per video clip, for various reasons. This is the equivalent of one hour of video at the recommended HD settings shown here or two hours of 720 per clip. If you need to use longer files, see the help section below.

File type and codec:
We accept files that end with .mp4 and .mov, containing H264 and H265/HEVC codec. Export these from your video editor and use the settings below.

Advanced note: mp4 and mov (also known as Quicktime) files can contain lots of different types of video data, known as codecs. Examples of codecs include VP9 and ProRes which have different quality settings and vastly different file sizes. We accept H264 and H265 codecs and recommend the settings below.

Resolution / Frame Size:
1920 x 1080 recommended – i.e. 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high – the standard HD video size.

Advanced note: We also accept 4K/UHD files at 3840×2160, though we don’t recommend this, and lower resolutions like 1280 x 720 (at 4Mb/s) which is popular on the web particularly for smaller embedded videos to use less data.
For more details of these, see below.

Frame Rate:
30fps (frames per second) recommended.
It will accept whatever you give it, but 30fps works well on the web, and gives a good file size at a reasonable quality.

Advanced note: Using more frames per second demands proportionally higher bitrates and file sizes to keep the same quality, without any real visual benefit on the web by adding more frames per second. Some sports cameras record at 60fps or 50fps by default – to save data, try to make your video editor import them to your edit project at half the frame rate (30 or 25fps) without slowing them down or making them jittery.

Quality / Bitrate:
8 Mb/s recommended
Use this rate for 1920 x 1080 videos at 30fps.
which means a single clip can be approx 8.5 minutes at our 500MB limit.

Audio:
AAC 16 bit Stereo 96kbps 44.1kHz recommended
Other audio settings are also acceptable.

Other resolutions and quality levels for regular 16:9 video:

4K/UHD – 3840×2160 at 14Mb/s (at ~30fps). We don’t recommend this, because even though 14Mb/s is our balance of quality vs size for streaming, many people are on internet connections that will struggle to stream at this bitrate – and most people cannot tell the difference between HD and 4K/UHD video on a computer screen. People use this only when using 360 video and only then if the subject matter needs extra visual quality.

1280 x 720 at 4Mb/s at ~30fps – this is popular on the web.
People use this if they are embedding their videos at a smaller-than-HD size, or want to use less data, or want a video to last longer than 8.5 minutes within the 4GB file size limit (see below).

640×360 at 1Mb/s at ~30fps – this is considered very small and low quality in the modern era – though not long ago it was what most web videos used to be!
People use this if they are embedding their videos for smaller mostly-mobile screens, or need to be streamed by people with very low speed internet connections, or want to use much less data, or are making an audio-only experience, or want a video to last a long time within the 4GB limit, delivering on mobile only.

1920 x 1080 pixels resolution recommended – but any size is possible within the player’s 16:9 rectangular frame. Resize using the Adobe image converter linked below.

JPG at 8/12 or 75% quality recommended.

We also accept PNGs but they are larger and take a bit longer to load.

We do not accept webp images yet. Please convert them in your computer’s image software.

To convert image file types (eg png to jpg), crop, or change frame sizes:
On Mac: Open the file in Preview, make changes and choose File>Export.
On PC: Open the file in Photos, click the three-dot menu icon at the top right corner of Photos and choose Save As…, then in the new window click the “Save as type” dropdown menu and change the file format to jpg.

Or use the Adobe image converter online – click the Features menu at the top here for lots of options.

Stornaway.io creators can add 360º videos to their stories and link them up using on screen links to create interactive experiences that are even more immersive.

We support Equirectangular/Sphere video at 360º. See settings below for how to activate this once your video is uploaded.

360 videos should be 2:1 width to height ratio, rather than regular 16:9.

The files that come out of a 360 camera like an Insta 360 are huge – both in their height & width resolution and in the amount of data they use. 

For Stornaway, we need to stream these files to people all over the world with different internet connection speeds and data costs, so we need to be very efficient about the balance of quality and file size so that the files will stream and it won’t cost too much.

So we compared notes with other streamers and chose a balanced resolution and file size of 2880×1440 for the web at data rate quality of 14 megabits per second if you’re publishing just on the web.

And we recommend you export your videos for upload at 3840×1920 and 20 megabits per second of you’re also planning to publish to VR via our App Builder.

The next question is, do you want to take clips direct from your camera app into Stornaway, or do you want to put them into a video editing app like Premiere or Final Cut first? 

If you’re taking it out of the camera app (eg Insta 360 Studio) into Stornaway, you should export it at the above settings, depending on whether you’re making it just for the web or for both VR apps and web.

If you want to take it into an editing app first, then you should export it from your camera app at the original resolution to keep the quality highest in your editing app and improve flexibility for later – and then when your edit is done, you should export from your editing app using the above Stornaway settings.

More about 360 in Stornaway

Your project can be entirely 360, or a mix of different media. Each Story Island is its own unique section. You can link from 360º to regular 16:9 video and stills in different story islands, and it will all flow on seamlessly. They all show with the Stornaway links you know and love.

Upload 360º video and link islands as normal – your story can be entirely 360 or mix 360 with regular 16:9 video and stills, all flowing seamlessly. 360 upload is available on the 7-day trial; full access requires a paid plan. Binaural sound is also supported for spatially located audio, ideal for headphone listening.

When your project fails validation, it means there’s one of 3 settings missing that will stop the published project working properly, or a wrong type of image file.

• Either you don’t have one Start island set
• or one of your islands does not have a Default choice
• or one of your islands does not have a timing set for its choices.
• or you have uploaded a webp format image file – instead you must use jpg, png or gif

To fix the first 3 of these, go to your Story Map to see where the errors are.

If you have no Start island set or more than one, it will show an error message at the top left of screen, like this.

You need to set only one island as your Start, so that the Stornaway.io player knows where to begin. It may be that you have deleted the original start island, or that you have set more than one island as your start – either way, you need to choose the one that you want. You can find the Start checkbox near the top of the sidebar, underneath Name and Description.

If that message isn’t shown, then the problem will be with one or more of your islands missing a Default choice or a Choice Timing.

Look to see which of your islands is highlighted in Red with an exclamation mark at the bottom right, like this:

Select that island and open the sidebar, to see where the error is showing.

It will tell you whether you need to add a default choice by saying “One of the choices must be set as default.” in red above the choices.

Or it will say “A time of display must be set” – telling you that you should put a number of seconds into the “Display X s from end” box.

As shown in these screenshots:

What if I can’t set a Default because my choice is an External URL?

One of the choices needs to be a default, but currently you are unable to edit the default box if the link is to an external URL. We’ll change this in future.

In the meantime, the way to make your project validate is to set another choice as a default.

So if you only have one choice/button on this island, then just create another choice, leave it unlinked, make it the default and hide it by ticking the Hide checkbox.

If you have any problems, let us know at support@stornaway.io

This usually happens when buttons on an island are set to appear at 0 seconds from the end. On mobile, this can prevent the menu from displaying correctly and may cause the island to pause before the buttons show. To fix it, update the button timing to at least 1 second from the end – we recommend always using 1 second or more to ensure consistent playback across devices. It’s also worth checking any other islands in your project to make sure none are set to 0 seconds.