A quicker way to revisit your H5P resources

Course design involves plenty of creating, testing and reviewing. It also involves coming back to resources you made months—or years—ago and working out what can be used again.

Folders and sensible file names help, but they only tell part of the story. Sometimes you need to open an activity, click through the questions, listen to the audio and see how it actually works before deciding whether it belongs in your next course.

While building a new range of support materials, I found myself reviewing a collection of more than 100 H5P activities across mixed subjects. Some were older resources that still had something useful to offer, even if they needed a refresh.

That brought up a small but persistent problem: browsing H5P files on a Windows desktop does not give you the same quick view you get with an image or a document. Opening activities one at a time makes a simple review job more involved than it needs to be.

So I went looking for a better way—and ended up building a viewer for the file manager I use.

H5P inside the Directory Opus viewer pane

The ACS H5P Viewer plays local H5P lessons directly inside the Directory Opus 13 viewer pane on Windows x64. Slides, questions, audio, video and captions remain interactive, so you can explore the activity while browsing your files.

Select another H5P file to move to the next lesson. If you have updated a package, use Reload to read its changed contents.

For my workflow, the value is straightforward: less time opening resources and more time deciding what to keep, refresh or reuse.

Watch the viewer in action

The video below shows the viewer in use.

Another useful H5P project

A mention also goes to the H5P Offline Player from missing-elements, which supplies the playback component used by the ACS viewer.

It is a browser-based player that can open H5P packages from disk or a URL without a server unpacking them first. The project also offers an installable offline web app for Chrome or Edge—a useful option to explore if you want to play local H5P files in the browser.

H5P Offline Player on GitHub Try the H5P Offline Player

Try a mixed H5P activity

Here is an example of a mixed H5P activity in action. Click through it to explore how different elements work together in one resource.

Getting started with the ACS viewer

The ACS viewer is an early community source release, version 0.1.0. It requires Directory Opus 13, Windows x64, Node.js 22 or later, and the Microsoft WebView2 Runtime. Local H5P packages need to include their required libraries and media.

It is a playback tool: it does not edit lessons or save learner results. It is built for Directory Opus, and does not add a preview pane to Windows File Explorer. H5P content-type coverage is still being tested.

The repository provides source, build scripts and setup guidance; this first release does not have a hosted binary download.

My ACS H5P Viewer on GitHub

Sometimes a small workflow improvement is enough to make a large resource collection useful again. For me, being able to browse a folder and interact with a lesson in the viewer pane makes it easier to bring older work back into new teaching materials.