Convert YouTube Videos For PowerPoint
The Challenge
You want to insert a video into your presentation. Why do you need to do this?
- Maybe you want to play some music while the audience is entering the room and settling in.
- Or you want to insert a moment of humour mid-presentation.
- You might want to demonstrate a short procedure directly in the presentation.
- You might even want to leave the audience with a surprising ‘thank you’ slide.
Whatever your reason, it is entirely possible that in the YouTube collection, there is a video that suits your purpose. The problem: you can’t just download the video to your hard disk and insert into PowerPoint. The native download format from YouTube will not work in PowerPoint.
The Solution
The solution: use YouConvertIt.com for free and painless conversion to Windows media format.
Step-by-Step
You may just want to go to the site — the conversion procedure is obvious once you get there, but here are the main steps anyway.
- Find the video you want to insert from YouTube. I always make sure I choose one that is crisp, well-produced, and short as I want to project a good image and not break the flow of the presentation too much.
- Copy the URL from the location bar (e.g. http://youtube.com/watch?v=mpMJbRhhi6Q)
- Go to http://www.youconvertit.com/ and hit the Convert Online Video tab
- Paste the YouTube URL as requested
- Provide the email address where you want to receive the download link for the converted video (you will not receive the video itself so there will be no attachment, thus not running the risk of overloading your email.)
- From the drop-down menu at the bottom, select WMV (Windows Media Video)
- Click Convert It
- After a few minutes, check your email account, follow the link provided in the email and download the video to your hard disk.
- Start up your PowerPoint presentation and navigate to the slide where the video will appear.
- Select Insert > Movies and Sounds > Movie from File…
- Navigate to the downloaded converted video file and click OK
- A dialog will pop up to ask if this video should play automatically or only when clicked. Make your choice.
- Press Shift-F5 to test your slide and check your video. The video object may be positioned and resized (within limits) as with any picture.
The Alternatives
YouConvertIt.com is not the only service doing this. A couple of others you might want to try:
- Online FLV Converter: This has the advantage that it downloads straight to your hard disk without the need for an intermediate step on email. The disadvantage: it seems to take much longer compared to YouConvertIt.
- MediaCoder: This bills itself as a free universal batch media transcoder. The advantage: this is the most powerful tool here and it has a huge list of options and formats to allow you to consider, select or tweak. The disadvantage: all the options that make this a universal batch media transcoder make for an extremely daunting interface and it is only for geeks at this stage.
Happy conversions! (Remember of course that just because you can do this, doesn’t give you the right to take someone else’s property so use Creative Commons or at least your common sense.)
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3 Responses to “Convert YouTube Videos For PowerPoint”
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Amazing, they are a WEB 2.0 that supports all media files conversion it is called http://youconvertit.com, they can do the following:
1- Convert document, images, audio, video and Archived files.
2- Convert any Youtube and other Online Video to popular formats or download the video
3- Send file(s) up to 300 MB to friends or post it on any forum for 7 days
4- Convert any type of units (Acceleration, Area, Torque and others)
what makes them amazing is you can add up to 5 different file formats, i used them to convert a document and couple of audio files.
Try them and give me your feedback http://www.youconvertit.com
Thanks, James. You are right, of course. I highlighted the video conversion function here because it is the easiest I have found to date for a fairly common and irritating problem.
very nice. i was googling “powerpint videos, youtube” and i got you.
thanks for the step by step.