How to Replace Images, Audio, and Video in a Published SCORM Course

The brand changed. The product got renamed. The narrator mispronounced a term. A screenshot is from an old version of the software. None of these need a content rewrite — they need a media swap. And when the original Storyline or Captivate project is gone, swapping media in the published package is often the fastest, safest fix available. Here is how to do it without breaking the course.

How published courses reference media

In modern Storyline output, media is not pasted into the slides — it is stored as files and referenced indirectly. Images live in a story content folder and are pulled in through an asset library, where each asset has an ID and the slide data says "this slide uses asset 47." Audio narration is stored as separate files, usually MP3, again referenced per slide. Video is more involved: courses often ship video as adaptive streaming, an HLS playlist plus a folder of small segment files, rather than one MP4.

This indirection is what makes swapping possible. Because the slide points at a file rather than embedding it, you can change the file the pointer resolves to. But it also means the same file can be shared — one logo referenced by several slides under different asset IDs — so a swap can affect more places than you expect.

Replacing images

Image swaps are the most reliable. The key rule is to match the original as closely as possible:

• Match the dimensions. Storyline sizes images according to the slide layout. A replacement with very different dimensions can appear stretched, squashed, or cropped because the layout expects the original aspect ratio.
• Match the format where you can. Swapping a PNG for a PNG is the cleanest path; if you change format, make sure the course actually serves the new one correctly.
• Keep transparency if the original had it. A logo on a colored background that loses its transparent edges suddenly shows an ugly box.
• Remember the mobile variants. Many courses ship separate, smaller image variants for mobile. Update those too, or mobile learners see the old image.

Replacing audio

Re-recording a line of narration is a common request, and audio swaps work well with one big caveat: timing. Slides are often synchronized to the audio — animations, on-screen text, and slide advances can be cued to points in the narration. If your replacement clip is a different length, those cues can drift out of sync. The safest audio swap is a re-recording that closely matches the original clip length. A wildly longer or shorter clip needs the timeline adjusted, which is authoring-tool territory.

Replacing video

Video is the trickiest of the three. If the course ships video as a single MP4, swapping it is similar to an image swap — replace the file, keep the path. But if the course uses adaptive HLS streaming, the "video" is actually a playlist file plus many segment files, and you cannot just drop in a new MP4 and expect it to play. Replacing HLS video means producing a properly segmented replacement that matches how the player expects to load it. This is the case most likely to need a tool rather than a manual file swap.

What is safe versus what is not

• Safe: replacing an image, audio clip, or video file with an equivalent that matches dimensions, format, and roughly the original length, keeping the file reference intact.
• Risky: changing dimensions or aspect ratios significantly, which breaks layout.
• Risky: changing audio length on timing-synced slides, which desyncs animations and captions.
• Not a media swap at all: changing what a slide does, when content appears, or how an interaction behaves — that is timeline and trigger logic, which belongs in the source file.

Verify in the player

1. Play the affected slides and confirm the new image, audio, or video appears and plays.
2. Watch the browser console for 404s — a path mismatch is the most common failure.
3. Check the mobile variant and the desktop variant both updated.
4. For audio, confirm animations and captions still line up.
5. Confirm the course still reports completion to the LMS as before.

A clean media swap changes what the learner sees or hears and nothing else — same layout, same timing, same completion behavior.

Swapping media without touching the file structure

ScormEdit lets you replace images, audio, and video in a published SCORM package right in the browser. It surfaces the media the course actually references, lets you drop in a replacement, handles the asset-library references and mobile variants for you, and repackages a valid SCORM zip with the manifest at the root. You preview the result before downloading, so you catch a stretched logo or a desynced clip before it reaches a learner — no source file, no path-juggling, no broken references.