What Are the 3 Types of PowerPoint Movies?

PowerPoint can be an effective or ineffective tool for giving a presentation, depending on the how the presenter incorporates the available media. To help presenters, Microsoft has included the ability to add movies to PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint in Microsoft supports three, and sometimes four, file types. To add video to PowerPoint, select "Insert>Movie" and "Sounds>Movie>From File." After you select your movie file, you can specify whether PowerPoint plays the movie automatically or when you click on it.

Compatibility

The types of movies that PowerPoint can play will vary between operating systems. Macintosh programs prefer to use Quicktime Movie (.mov) formats. Therefore, PowerPoint for Mac allows these types movie types; however, they generally will not play on a PC that is running PowerPoint for Windows. Similarly, Windows uses Windows Media files (.wmv). These types of movies will not play in Macintosh. Therefore, if you plan to use movie on a Mac and Windows platform, MPEG files are your best option.

WMV

Microsoft Windows Media Video or WMV is a format that was created by Microsoft specifically for playing high quality videos in Windows with Microsoft's Media Player. This file type is also compatible with Microsoft's PowerPoint; therefore, it is usually your best choice for playing videos inside PowerPoint.

AVI

Audio Video Interleave, or AVI files, are the standard audio and video format in Windows. Microsoft developed this file type in order to capture files from A/V devices; therefore, most videos that come from a recorder are saved as AVI files. PowerPoint can usually play AVI files because it a format that is commonly used. One concern with AVI files is that video files are large and require a lot of space. This also means that they will play slower in PowerPoint. You can compress the video; however, this will make the image pixellated.

MPG

Moving Picture Experts Group developed a standard for smaller video formats that display at practically the same quality as AVI files. The standards are continually improving the quality of compressed videos. As a result, developers have several different file extensions including MPEG, MPG, MP3 and M1V. However, Powerpoint can only play videos in MPG and MPEG. These two file types usually contain separate layers for the audio and video.

ASF

In addition to the three common file types, PowerPoint can include some Advanced Streaming Formats, or ASF. This file type is an open source audio and video format. Because it is open source, it is encoded with Codecs. ASF can be played in many different types of media players, including PowerPoint. PowerPoint uses this format when you publish your presentation for streaming.

References

• Movies or Video Clips in PowerPoint
• Using Video in PowerPoint
• Supported File Formats