How to embed a DVD clip into Powerpoint?
June 12, 2006 7:00 AM   Subscribe

How can I put clips of a DVD into Powerpoint?

My wife is giving a presentation in class and thinks an embedded movie would seal the deal. Unfortunately, I've never dealt with this sort of thing and I have to figure it out tonight.

Any suggestions for how to pull a clip (a minute or two in duration) from a commercial DVD and embed it into a Powerpoint presentation?

For background, I'm using Powerpoint 2003, the DVD is "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (US version?). Free software solutions are greatly preferred.
posted by jmevius to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mac or Windows?
posted by Gungho at 7:14 AM on June 12, 2006


After a little browsing through VideoHelp I found This Link which will teach you, using all freeware utilities, to rip a DVD into a full-length AVI clip on your computer with XviD compression. Once that is taken care of, you can use VirtualDub to take the film and extract the clip you need (and have some pretty stellar quality to boot!). Hope this helps.
posted by CXImran at 7:26 AM on June 12, 2006


Ah, also, my tip was for windows.
posted by CXImran at 7:26 AM on June 12, 2006


I do this a lot under Windows. I use DVDx (no need to rip the whole DVD: will rip any random sequence to AVI or MPEG) and VirtualDub for fine tuning.

Unfortunately, to do it properly the first time around, you must invest some time in figuring out how VirtualDub and codecs in general work. Shortcut: *MAKE SURE* you encode the audio in MP3 and the video in some flavor of MPEG4 (i.e. Xdiv or Microsoft's Mpeg4 codec version 2 (version 1 is simply unusable).

Powerpoint's help is fairly straight-forward when it comes to explaining how to make it happen from within PPT.
posted by magullo at 7:46 AM on June 12, 2006


Free trial version of AOA DVD Ripper. There's a function on this ripper to select a clip (defined by beginning and end time of the scene you want to use.

Once the clip is ripped, you just do Insert | Movies and Sounds | Movie from file

This is assuming that the DVD ripper will let you rip from what is surely a copy-protected DVD.
posted by La Cieca at 7:48 AM on June 12, 2006


Response by poster: For what it's worth, I'm on a Windows box.
posted by jmevius at 9:08 AM on June 12, 2006


I had to do this just last week. I downloaded a trial version of AnyDVD, which decrypted and copied a bunch of *.vob files to my hard disk.

I then used Media Coder to convert the VOB file into an MPEG file which I then embedded in the PP 2003 presentation.

AnyDVD is not free, but you can use it during the free trial. It's an excellent program and extremely easy to use so it's worth purchasing.

MediaCoder is Open Source so that's free. Fortunately, the clip I wanted for my presentation was in the first 5 minutes of the movie so I told MC to convert only the first 5 minutes.

It was all (relatively) quick and painless...
posted by apark at 11:25 AM on June 12, 2006


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