Thanks to changes in Powerpoint 2010, Microsoft has made embedding a youtube video in a slideshow simultaneously easier and impossible. Back in the olden days of PowerPoint 2003, embedding a video required manually editing the URL of the video, opening the control toolbox, manually creating a Shockwave Flash Object, and pasting in the edited URL. Not easy, not especially intuitive.
In newer versions, Microsoft has made the process easier by creating an option to insert a video from the web and asking for the embed code for the video:
Easy-peasy, right? Except that PPT only works with the old embed code, which youtube no longer makes available. D’oh!
No problem–I’ll just go to someplace like pwnyoutube and download the video using a handy web service. Oh wait, those don’t work anymore because Google threatened litigation.
What’s a fellow to do? I found two solutions. First, via Google’s youtube product forum, I found that you can manually fill in the blanks to create the old embed code by hand:
Just substitute the character string that follows “watch?v=” in your youtube URL for the red text and change the numbers in blue to set the size of the video. Works fine. Unless . . . the video has embedding “disabled by request.”
That’s where option number two comes in. Just install Easy Youtube Video Downloader plugin for Firefox. You don’t even have to restart Firefox after you add (but you will have to reload the youtube video page). Now you’ll see a Download button below the video that pulls down a menu listing download options:
You’re not quite done, though, because none of the video options are in a format that PPT recognizes (thanks a lot, Microsoft). You’ll need to use a video converter to change it into something that PPT will play. I like WinFF (which despite its name also works in Linux as well as Windows; sorry Mac folks, you’re on your own*). which even has a PPT preset.
*Let’s face it, if you’re a Mac person, you’re probably shouldn’t be using PPT anyway.
