Saving a youtube video and/or converting an FLV file to a WMV file

You can save a youtube video with this site:

http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/

But when you save it, it comes as an FLV file. You can use some weird players to play that file, but you can also convert that file to a WMV file, which is so much easier and useful.

This tool can convert FLV to WMV:
http://www.t-solve.com/software/easy_ffmpeg.zip

Basically, unzip it and then from a DOS prompt, run:
ffmpeg -i file.flv newfile.wmv

Embedding video into a Powerpoint

I already know how to embed an audio file into a Powerpoint (see previous blog entry) - but I had never needed to put video into a Powerpoint until today. I wasn't successful in making this work right - but it seems sound. Here are instructions for embedding a video into Powerpoint:

–Save video or video segment to your computer
–View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox
–Click on More Controls (hammer and wrench icon)
–Scroll down to Windows Media Player
–Draw a box that will become the image below
–Right click on the media player > Select properties
–Click on the empty cell next to “Custom”
–Browse for your video > Click OK
–In slideshow mode, you will be able to play the video embedded with controls like rewind, fast forward, sound, etc.
–You can also right click to open more menu controls, like View > Full Screen