HELP! PPT2010 and embedded videos

 Let me try to answer to your questions. 

1. In theory, You can rightmouse click Powerpoint files and select properties on the menu. If the file size of the files is relatively huge,  you can assume that the presentation contains video clips. 

2. It depends on whether presenters make a link to an external video (because of copyright issues or  whatever reasons... ) or embed a video clip in their Powerpoint clips. Do you need to extract videos and convert them for all the presenters? It is much easier for you to ask presenters do it on their own.

Hi Sami

Thanks for the response. I have found a solution but first some background.

Not, tech manager, but external service provider that converts PPT to Flash (using Articulate, of course) with integrated streaming and synchronisation in near real time. So we deal with multiple versions of PPT simultaneously. We need "instant" solutions that can effectively batch. You will understand our requirement to "tool" the solution when I tell you that we have up to 16 rooms recording simultaneously over 5 days.

So we are dealing with 650-800 presentations in various versions of ppt (not to mention Keynotes) and the majority of each day's content is completed, converted, mounted and streaming not long after the end of each day. Thus, not being able to see videos is a huge bottleneck in production where up to 30% of presentations contain video. (I should preface that I suspect / hope that the majority of presenters here will still be on PPT07 and lower, but...)

File size is not a good indicator on its own as most of our conferences are graphics intensive. Most presenters don't optimise images so we can have +300mb presentations without video.

It is only PPT10 that does not require the video file to be brought as part of the presentation package. Effectively it treats a video like any graphic component and parcels it into the .pptx. So, for a smart user that optimises their content, the file size alone wold not be a good indicator of the presence of video. Additionally, if created in PPT10 but saved as a ppt (as opposed to a pptx) it will still work also!

Added to this MS seems to have gotten its act together (!) and made PPT10 fully backwards compatible with PPT07 so a 10 presentation with videos in it should play in 07 without having the actual video files to reference.

SO...

There appears to be two solutions which I assume are related. ARTIC TECH take note:

By changing the file extension from ppt(x) to zip and then unzipping, it provides a full list of all embedded content in the presentation and it's source. Irrespective of what version of PPT. Yay!

The other solution is actually provided by MS itself in an application called Powershell. Here is a link to someone that has a script that will do the whole thing; looks neat but will leave to my developers:

http://www.heikniemi.net/hardcoded/2010/04/extracting-media-files-from-a-powerpoint-presentation-with-powershell/

So hopefully we can now add a further arrow to our expanding quiver of conference solutions. Apologies if that sounds like a pitch!

Will re-post to let you know how we go.

Tks

Rob

I should have asked a context or background of this situation. Thank you so much for your specific responses.

Let us know how your conference goes of you don't mind. In particular, I am very interested in the video converting stuff since I have been working in that field although I got to know Articulate only in Feb. Good luck!