[OS X TeX] Beamer and Movie Media

[David Craig]

> On Feb 17, 2018, at 12:00 PM, macosx-tex-request at email.esm.psu.edu wrote:
> From: David Goldenberg <goldenberg at biology.utah.edu>
> 
> I have spent more time than I care to think about on this issue myself! 
> 
> For what it is worth, I keep coming back to movie15, even in its deprecated state, because it seems to do most of what I need it to do.  Unfortunately, I can?t recall what the stumbling blocks were when I tried media9, but it wasn?t for lack of trying!  I can say, though, that some of the options just didn?t work on my system.  Obviously, YMMV!

Indeed.   That has been my experience as well, as I indicated in my original message.   I have simply been unable to persuade media9 to work most of the time.   (And yes, I have RTFM.)   I have had better luck, though quite imperfect, with the older packages, same as you.  My guess is media9 works better on Windows?  Dunno.

Most of the media I’ve tried to embed are already H264, but maybe re-encoding them using ffmpeg anyway as Victor suggests is the special sauce.   Anyway, I will try again.   The relative silence in response to my post suggests I’m not missing the obvious, and indeed these packages just DON’T work very well.  I’d be pleased to be convinced otherwise!

However, this suggestion 

> If I may suggest, instead of the always flaky business of embedding media files in your pdf, with packages that come and go, why not just make links? 
> 
> \href{run:mymovie.mov}{Let's watch it}

was really helpful.    I did not know you could do that!   

David

>> On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 4:53 AM, David Craig <dac at panix.com> wrote:
>>> I?m finally making the push to do my more math-heavy presentations in
>>> beamer rather than Keynote.   Now that I?m past the steepest part of the
>>> learning curve I?m generally quite happy with how much easier it is, and
>>> I?ve found ways to reproduce most of my favorite visual presentation tropes
>>> in beamer.
>>> 
>>> HOWEVER, I am still struggling to include media in my presentations
>>> smoothly, specifically, things like animated gifs, and movies in various
>>> formats/containers (X.mov, X.mpg, X.mp4).   I?ve googled around, but the
>>> options I have found most frequently recommended (deprecated or not) ?
>>> multimedia, movie15, media9 ? just don?t work very well and are very
>>> particular about file formats.  Things that QuickTime player can play fine
>>> and/or the Finder can QuickLook often don?t work (even when the package
>>> documentation says it should for that format).
>>> 
>>> So, I?m seeking best-practice advice from Mac users on including movie
>>> media in beamer presentations.   If there?s a specific format that will
>>> reliably work in beamer with a particular package, I?m willing to make the
>>> conversions.   I?m just intent on some degree of reliability for the next
>>> few years at least.
>> Use media9 which supersedes movie15. Read package documentation
>> 
>> Movie should  be with x264 codec. Use ffmpeg
>> 
>> % ffmpeg -i foo.mov -vcodec libx264 foo.mp4
>> 
>> or Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/) to convert


<http://www.panix.com/~dac/>


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