9/30/12

Video formatting for PowerPoint embedding

If you have problem embedding videos into your PowerPoint presentation, here's some help.
You need to convert your video to a format PowerPoint accepts. However even if you are able to embed your video and play it on your computer, it doesn't mean it will be playable on other computers. I tried quite a few combinations of video/audio format (h264, mp3, aac etc.) and found the least common denominator of video/audio format that can be embedded in PowerPoint and played on almost all windows computers is wmv2/wmav2. So here’s command for video conversion with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i video1.mov -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -f asf video1.wmv
The resulting video quality is usually not very good, the images are often pixelated. To get better video quality, you need to specify bitrate:
ffmpeg -i video1.mov -b 1500k -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -f asf video1.wmv
Here I specified 1500kbps bitrate. You can set higher bitrate. Of course it doesn’t make sense to go above the video’s original bitrate. You can find the a video’s original bitrate from ffmpeg output or on Windows, right click the video file and select “Properties” then “Details” tab. Try different bitrates and select a lower one while still maintaining an image quality. Often times, I want to keep my video (and therefore the size of PowerPoint) small by shrinking the video (e.g. 320x240) like this:
ffmpeg -i video2.mp4 -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -f asf -s 320x240 video2.wmv
Small video has an marginal benefit besides small file size: because the image size is small, the effect of pixilation is markedly reduced. Even with smaller size, with several videos in the Powerpoint, the file can still be too large to be sent with email(gmail and yahoo mail have 25Meg limit). To solve this problem, I usually just embed small, low quality, incomplete “teaser” videos with notes and links to complete 1080p videos I (pre)uploaded on youtube. To cut a 30 second video, starts from 5 seconds at original video:
ffmpeg -i 027.MOV -ss 00:05 -t 30 -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -f asf -s 480x270 027s.wmv
My original 1 minute 1920x1080 video is 180MB, the half-minute “teaser” video is only 1.1MB.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Avdshare Video Converter ,as converter, the MP4 to PowerPoint Converter will surely convert and insert MP4 to PowerPoint easily. Besides that, this great app can add other video format like RMVB, FLV, VOB, AVCHD, MTS, M2TS, F4V, MKV, 3GP, WTV, RM, DV, MXF, WebM, etc. to PowerPoint. Y ou can get it at
http://www.avdshare.com/mp4-to-powerpoint-converter

Anonymous said...

If you are looking for really good way to design your content, try to use professional pp templates in your presentations. It will save you a lot of time and your presentations will be perfect and impressive.