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Kelmon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 28, 2005
733
0
United Kingdom
Hi Guys,

I made the mistake of creating a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac that incorporated a number of movie files ripped from YouTube that my manager now wishes me to distribute to the rest of my department. The problem here is that *SHOCK* everyone else is running Windows (2000 and XP) and that, by default, Windows and PowerPoint doesn't understand MPEG-4 files an when someone reaches a slide with a movie on it they are greeted with the dialog from Windows Media Player "The file you are attempting to play has an extension that does not match the file format. Playing the file may result in unexpected behaviour" followed by PowerPoint displaying the message "QuickTime and a mpeg4 decompressor are needed to see this picture.". I need to get these movie files into a format that Windows understands by default since asking people to install QuickTime is not an option (believe it or not but having it installed means that our online Accounts Payable images can't be displayed).

I have a license for QuickTime Pro and the only thing that I can think of at the moment is getting a license for Flip4Mac WMV Studio at $50. Any other ideas?
 
Hi Guys,

Thanks for the suggestions. I've installed ffmpegx but, as best as I can tell, it offers pretty much the same options as QuickTime Pro (MPEG-4, h.264, DivX, Flash, etc.) and, from my testing, Windows doesn't seem to support them natively. I did think that the AVI option ought to work but that generates the same error message as before, except this time it doesn't ask for an MPEG-4 decompressor.

I think I'll give VisualHub a try since it seems to support the export of WMV and it's about half the price of WMV Studio.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I've installed ffmpegx but, as best as I can tell, it offers pretty much the same options as QuickTime Pro (MPEG-4, h.264, DivX, Flash, etc.) and, from my testing, Windows doesn't seem to support them natively. I did think that the AVI option ought to work but that generates the same error message as before, except this time it doesn't ask for an MPEG-4 decompressor.

Two things:

1) Why don't the Windows computers support Flash?

2) Be careful with AVI...there's a common misunderstanding about AVI. AVI is NOT A CODEC. It's a standard for the *wrapper*. So when you select AVI, you have to make sure you're selecting an appropriate codec. I'm not actually sure what an appropriate codec in ffmpegx is to be used on Windows... since your Windows users probably don't have DIVX or XVID.

But anyway, VisualHub is easy, cheap, and seems very nice. Download the trial and see if the basic idea works, and then expense it if it does! :D

In VisualHub, I'd try WMV instead of AVI... it's more likely to be problem-free on Windows.
 
VisualHub seemed to do the job and the evaluation version works for me since the clips are only a couple of seconds in duration anyway (the evaluation version only works for clips upto about 2 minutes in length). I used the MPEG export option in the end, mostly because PowerPoint 2004 doesn't recognise WMV files for import and, presumably, playback.

Thanks for the suggestions.
 
Why don't the Windows computers support Flash?

I didn't even bother with the Flash option. While Windows undoubtedly support Flash, I believe that PowerPoint relies on Windows Media Player to display any video files and I highly doubt that Windows Media Player understands Flash video files. I could well be wrong about this, mind...
 
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