Video within a Powerpoint Slide

[sonni_kuba]

Hello,

I am planning to put up some powerpoint slides on a website that has a video embedded within. The website is tailored towards a very computer-naive audience.

My question is what format should I encode the video so that it may be viewable by the largest number of novice computer users? i.e. So that they don't have to download any codecs.

PS> The video source is a high-quality MPEG1 file (50 MB)3 minutes long.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[jggimi]

I would re-encode in MPEG-1, at a much lower bitrate (and perhaps a lower resolution, for image clarity). As far as I know, every version of Windows, from W95 forward, has MPEG-1 support. Obviously, your users would have to have a version of PowerPoint recent enough to support embedded video objects.

[sonni_kuba]

Thank you jggimi

I have re-encoded the segment in MPEG1 VBR (avg rate 400) and audio (Mono @64kps). Looks good, so far everyone can open it.

[keel]

We used to use MPEG1 movies in PowerPoint all the time, it was the easiest way to insert video in cross-platform presentations (Mac/PC). However, after installing Windows Media 9 in our Win2K PC, the movies won't play any more.

Has anyone successfully played MPEG1 in PowerPoint in Win2K with WM9 installed?

Thanks,
Frank Fulchiero
Connecticut College

[jggimi]

Have you reported your problem to Microsoft? It may be a bug they're not familiar with, or, it may be a known problem, such as http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;202070

[keel]

Thanks for the answer, it sound like the known problem you mentioned, although I won't have the time to test the solutions for a few days. And it is with Win2K and PowerPoint 2000.

The problem is that we distribute our presentations, and would prefer if the usually-not-very-tech-savvy-user did not have to get into their control panels. And the solution may disable/hurt other functions the computer is used for.

Hopefully Microsoft will fix this. I thought maybe they disabled MPEG1 playing in PP to drive people to use WMV9.

Frank Fulchiero
Connecticut College