Packing and unpacking a quiz

When you create large quizzes with lots of multimedia content, such as video and audio fragments, the quiz file can easily become large and tedious to work with during the edit phase, and can exhaust the PC’s internal memory. To deal with this, QuizXpress has historically supported keeping the media files external. This is fine during the development phase; however, when the quiz file needs to be moved to another PC or distributed to someone else, you must make sure to include all externally linked files, which, if not done correctly, can lead to problems. The ‘Pack’ function makes life a bit easier by packing all linked media files together with the quiz slides into one large file. This file can then be loaded into QuizXpress Live like a normal quiz file (which it is) and can conveniently be distributed as a single unit. Meanwhile, you can efficiently develop your quiz with all media files linked externally, keeping your save and load times as low as possible.

To pack a quiz, press F1 to go to the backstage menu and click ‘Pack’. QuizXpress Studio will then ask you to specify a filename and create the packed quiz file. Note that although the ‘packed’ file is a regular QuizXpress file, it is not intended to be edited in Studio, as this can lead to the problems described above.

You can also unpack a previously packed quiz file. This extracts all media (audio/video) to a local folder and links the media elements in the quiz to the local files. This speeds up quiz loading times and reduces memory usage in the quiz player. Its primary use is preventing issues when dealing with huge quiz files (~1.5GB or higher). To unpack a quiz, press F1 to go to the backstage menu and click ‘Unpack’.