A couple of times this year, at school and church, I’ve been asked how to get video from sites like YouTube into something that can be presented.
Grabbing the video from YouTube is easy, there are lots of sites that can do that for you. But you end up with an FLV file, which is viewable in VLC but not all that useful.
For your average user, the best method (that I’ve found) for allowing them to present video, is to have it embedded in a PowerPoint file. It allows them to resize the video or automatically go full-screen without the audience seeing any play buttons or media player toolbars. It also means that I can give them a PowerPoint file with the video already embedded (it’s really linked, the video file still exists separately). The only way I’ve had consistent success across machines with video in PowerPoint seems to be by having the video in Windows Media format (WMV).
So, I’ve tried various conversion methods. I had some success with the video encoding software SUPER (awful web-site). Yet, the other day, I just couldn’t get it to play nice.
Long story short, I came across youconvertit (one of the many online video conversion sites), and it’s conversion worked, it worked well, and gave me a reasonably sized WMV ready for embedding into PowerPoint. The 4 minute YouTube video ended up being a 12Mb WMV (320×240 pixels).
Have you got a good method for presenting video? i.e. something where the audience sees nothing more than the video itself? I’ve looked at some of the presenter applications (for example in the article Road testing PowerPoint alternatives) but wasn’t impressed by their complexity and the need to change the way things are currently done substantially.
Simon, I found TubeSock good for downloading the YouTube video. Then I use QuickTime Player for presenting full screen (I think this may require the pro version). If you import the video into iTunes, you can present the video full screen as well.