Videos compatible with Microsoft Powerpoint

We needed lately videos that were compatible with Microsoft Powerpoint. From what I understood it seems that Powerpoint supports natively only MPEG1 and WMV video codecs. After some testing I figured the options for mencoder in order to produce videos that would work with Powerpoint. Here the command line hoping that this might help other people in the future:

mencoder video.avi -o video.wmv -of lavf -oac lavc -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts vcodec=wmv1:vbitrate=1500:acodec=wmav1

Update: I added the audio codec, this should help to make audio work in Powerpoint. And thanks a lot for pointing out that file names (including the full path) should not be longer than 128 characters in Powerpoint.

5 Comments

  1. Jack says:
    January 27, 2010 at 8:09 pm

    Thanks very much, works a treat.

  2. Anonymous says:
    June 11, 2010 at 11:16 am

    Please add: … and make sure to have short file names. Any file name including full path must not be longer than 128 characters. (Found here, bottom of file, 2nd item in troubleshooting: http://www.deskshare.com/Resources/articles/vem_InsertingVideos_inPowerPoint.aspx)

    Thanks for the post!

  3. Markus says:
    June 23, 2011 at 10:42 pm

    Thank you very much! This is by far the solution I found. Thanks for sharing.

  4. garaged says:
    May 1, 2012 at 4:45 pm

    Thanks a lot, worked perfectly on a couple of videos I was exporting for powerpoint

  5. Alex says:
    May 8, 2012 at 11:51 pm

    Hey, thanks a lot for your comment! Happy that it helped you 🙂 .
    Alex

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September 11, 2009 Development, Linux