I imagine you know of an incident where someone opened a PowerPoint file and the video did not work. There were a lot of reasons, even ones that Microsoft admit to:
- Your video file was linked and lost via email…
- The video was linked through a path length > 128 characters
- You played the video and it popped into the top-most layer…
- The file format was not supported…
- A specific codec not installed…
- There was a conflict with incompatible hardware and hardware acceleration
PowerPoint didn’t do video
Quite frankly, while it seems PowerPoint did not do video, that is true! Versions from 2007 and earlier handed video tot he operating system; either the Media Control Interface (MCI) player or Windows Media Player. If that didn’t work, well you know the result!
Previously supported PowerPoint file types
On top of that, PowerPoint only supported a small number of file types:
- Windows media file (*.asf)
- Windows video file (*.avi)
- Movie file (*.mpg or *. mpeg)
- Windows media video (*.wmv)
Any other type of file was thrown to something PowerPoint could (hopefully) find to play it.
PowerPoint version 2010
PowerPoint 2010 supports a new range of file types:
- Windows streaming media: *. asf and others
- Windows video: *.avi and others
- Windows media video: *.wmv and others
- MP4: *.mp4 and others
- MPRG: *.mpeg adn others
- MPET-2 TS video: *.m2ts and others
- Quick Time: *. mov adn others (provided Quick Time Player is installed on your system)
- Adobe flash media: *.swf (provided Adobe Flash Player -32 bit- is installed on your system)
- Animated gif: which I do not consider video, and
- Vorbis Ogg: *.ogg
As with any software- please check thoroughly on your won and target machines. For example, I cannot insert the Windows Streaming Media format of * dvr-ms (Windows Television)- simply makes PowerPoint 2010 unstable.
Tags: animation sample, PowerPoint 2010, video