The Art of PowerPoint-ing : video

Play YouTube videos in PowerPoint

tohlz — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:57:00 GMT

If you have a YouTube video which you want to play it during the presentation, you can make use of the Shockwave Flash Object ActiveX Control.

To do so, open up PowerPoint.
Click View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox.
Click on the last icon, 'More Controls'.
Scroll down and look for Shockwave Flash Object.
Select the object, then insert it onto the slide.
Once you are done, right click on the object and select Properties.
Open Internet Explorer and look for the YouTube link. Copy the URL which should be something like: http://youtube.com/watch?v=0_jjLOqm2L4
Go into PowerPoint and double click on Custom in the Object's Properties.
Paste the URL under Movie URL.
Amend the url by replacing 'watch?v=' to 'v/' : http://youtube.com/v/0_jjLOqm2L4
Ok your way out and close the properties dialog box.
Now, you will be able to view the YouTube video in slide show!

Insert flv video into PowerPoint

tohlz — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:30:00 GMT

What is a flv video?
Flash Video, also known as flv, is a file format that is used to deliver video over the Internet. It uses the .flv file extension. Video sharing sites such as YouTube and MySpace make use of Flash Video format.

Inserting flv video into PowerPoint
There are several programs which allow you to view Flash Video. One example is VLC Media Player, which is free and can be downloaded at http://www.videolan.org.

To insert flv video into PowerPoint, one way is to make use of the VLC Media Player.
First, install the VLC Media Player.
Once done, create a folder.
Move the presentation and flv video to the folder.
Now, open the presentation.
Go to the slide which you want to have the Flash Video inserted.
You will need the control toolbox to be displayed.
Click View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox.
On the toolbar, click on the last icon which should be "More Controls". (For PowerPoint 2007, Click Developer tab. Under Controls, click on the icon "More Controls".)
Scroll right to the bottom and look for VideoLAN VLC ActiveX Plugin (both v1 and v2 is fine).
Click Ok.
Now, right click on the control that has been added, select Properties.
This will bring up the properties dialog box.
Under MRL, enter the filename (e.g. abc.flv).
Once done, close the dialog box.

Embedding Video

tohlz — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:01:00 GMT

Embed Video in PowerPoint
To insert video, you can click Insert > Movies and Sounds > Movie from File. Unfortunately, they are always linked. This causes link breaking issues when moving your presentation from one computer to another. The best solution would be to embed these videos. But how?

The first step
Insert it as an object. To do so, click Insert > Object > Create from file. Click Browse and look for the video you want to insert. Once you are done, click Ok twice.

Playing the video
Now here's the tricky part. To play the content, you will need to activate it using Custom Animation. Click Slide Show > Custom Animation. This will bring up the Custom Animation pane. Select the video that has been inserted. Click Add Effect > Object Actions > Activate Contents. If you want to play the video automatically during Slide Show, set the "Start" to "After Previous". Take note though, that the video will not be played in PowerPoint. Instead, the media player will be launched and the video will play from there. So far, this works for .mpg and .wmv video format. On the other hand, .avi will still be linked. Hence, if the video is in .avi format, you will need to convert it.