Embedding Video Files

users
#1

Earlier this week, I produced a presentation with embedded video for use in a school classroom (NSW Department of Education, in case anyone has personal knowledge of their set-up). I am using Libre Office 5.3 and Ubuntu 17.04.

I checked that the presentation worked, including the video. I saved it in .ppt format onto a USB stick with the video file, "just in case". This turned out to be a good thing.

The classroom has an old version of MS Office (2010, I think I saw), a projector and a smart board. I don't know what version of Windows they are running.

When I ran the presentation, everything went as expected. Touching the white board progressed the slides as expected. However I couldn't get the video to work from within the presentation, and had to run it from the media player.

It's not a big problem, and I can work around it, but when you have a classroom of Year 4 and 5 kids, you don't want to get too distracted by the technology.

Any ideas about how to make it work? Keep in mind that I have no access to their computer outside of my lesson time.

Thanks.

#2

​Saving to .ppt will only work with a basic set of features (and I doubt
embedding video is part of it).
There's also the issue of having the mean of reading the video itself
(software like VLC will happily read anything you throw at it, WMP not so
much).

​Without more details about the installation, it's hard to say, but a good
way to make sure it works would be to:
- Install LibreOffice Portable on a USB stick (when I say "install", it
mostly means "copy over")
- Save your file as .odt to keep all of your presentation

Assuming you can start software from the USB stick (some places restrict
that), it should provide you a mostly sure way of reading presentations on
a Windows machine.
However, video embedding is always tricky; it'd be better if you could
check that your file (container, codec, etc.) works fine on said machine.
If it works once, it'll always work, but it might depends on the Windows
version. From this
<https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/854/what-video-formats-does-libreoffice-impress-support/>
old internet post, on Windows it uses DirectShow, which might or might not
support some video formats.

#3

For this reason I always have a usb stick with LibreOffice as portable app.

This can fe found on https://portableapps.com/apps/office/libreoffice_portable

I've done this for years now, since Powerpoint different versions played tricks on me displaying black characters on black background.

Rob Jasper

#4

Thanks.

I might give it a go.

Keith

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
It might be good to have a few other programs as portable apps. I think
VLC, Firefox and Chrome are all available. You probably don';t want the
distraction of having web-browsers tho.

There are a few other systems doing portable apps. I'm not sure there is a
huge amount of difference between them for what you need at the moment.

It's probably still a good idea to have your presentations in both ppt and
odt formats until you've seen the portable apps thing work.

Having videos outside of the presentation is probably always going to be a
good idea. If you are expecting it and prepared for it then it's hopefully
fairly easy to get it running. The problem with embedding such things is
they weigh down an app quite a bit without making it that much easier to
run. It depends on personal preference though rather than any technical
reasoning.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :slight_smile: