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I'm trying to include a movie in a beamer presentation. I've tried many things, and it seems I finally got it to work by something like this:

\documentclass[xcolor=dvipsnames]{beamer}
\usepackage{media9}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}

\begin{center}
\includemedia[
  activate=pageopen,
  width=300pt,
  height=170pt,
  keepaspectratio=true,
  addresource=./movies/Tacoma.mov,
  flashvars={%
src=./movies/Tacoma.mov
&scaleMode=stretch}
]{}{StrobeMediaPlayback.swf}
\end{center}

\end{frame}

\end{document}

where Tacoma.mov is a movie of the collapse of the Tacoma bridge due to wind loading (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xox9BVSu7Ok). The problem I see is that I have the movie, and when I create the presentation, LaTeX is embedding the movie in the pdf file, but this is not what I want to do because I don't want to duplicate the amount of memory. Is there a way to have the same behavior, but without embedding the actual movie in the pdf file?

I've seen that the beamer documentation proposes the use of the multimedia package, but I haven't been able to make it work without setting the externalviewer option. It gives me this error:

Macintosh HD:Users:aaragon:Desktop:hybrida LaTeX template:LaTeX:movies:Tacoma.mp4 cannot be found. Would you like to choose a replacement file?

My question is not restricted to the media9 package.

aaragon
  • 3,041
  • What's wrong with embedding the video file? If you don't, (as with themultimedia package) you will have to carry it around with the PDF. Alternatively you can embed the Youtoube version into the PDF using media9. Of course, you need an internet connection for viewing. – AlexG May 31 '15 at 12:12
  • Because in the end you need to store both the movie and the produced presentation, duplicating unnecessarily the size. How do you embed a YouTube video with media9? – aaragon May 31 '15 at 12:16
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    See the first example in the media9 manual or simply http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/97687. – AlexG May 31 '15 at 12:20
  • By the way. With media9, you don't need a separate video file for archiving purposes. With package option attachfiles you can always download the video file from the PDF to disk via the 'Attachments' pane of A-Reader. – AlexG May 31 '15 at 12:26
  • Perhaps, your question is a duplicate of http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/72993 – AlexG Jun 01 '15 at 06:48
  • My question is not restricted to media9. – aaragon Jun 01 '15 at 06:53
  • Ok, but using a local web-server for (large) video files would really be an option here. It is not that difficult to be set up. – AlexG Jun 01 '15 at 07:07
  • But that's in the case of playing flash videos, where it seems the security is an issue. I would like to play a video without having to embed the file in the resulting pdf file. I really think that someone should be able to do this without going through the hassle of setting up a web server. – aaragon Jun 01 '15 at 07:10
  • No, the video file should be in MP4/h264 format. Or MOV, as long as h264 codec was used. – AlexG Jun 01 '15 at 07:12
  • Is there a reason you cannot simply convert the ".mov" file to a ".avi" file and use the multimedia package? That is very simple and solves the issue with external players, needing an active internet connection, and not having the file embedded in the pdf. – cptnjtk Jun 01 '15 at 08:05
  • I haven't looked into that, but I'm on a Mac so AFAIK, avi is a Windows format (that I could also play on a Mac). But of course I haven't considered having other video formats because there are many out there. – aaragon Jun 01 '15 at 08:06
  • I should have put more explanation into why I said that. the avi extension works very well with the multimedia package, and I have used the produced pdf on windows and mac, and the videos play great (using Adobe Reader). It seems like a simple fix to your issue, though I did not immediately see you were on a Mac, so sorry about that. – cptnjtk Jun 01 '15 at 08:26

0 Answers0