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Native QuickTime in PowerPoint for Windows


A follow-up to our previous story iMovie Clip Trouble in PowerPoint.

One of the advantages of being a student at a large university is your access to sources of information, including that of Apple itself. The Mac community here is very strong, and this is what an Apple representative sent one of our Mac related email lists a short while back. Hope this helps:

I’m sure everyone is aware of the QuickTime ActiveX control that we released a while back to deal with Microsoft’s friendly decision to drop support for Netscape-style browser plug-ins. I’ve been wondering for a while whether this would help customers embed QuickTime content into Microsoft Office applications — namely, PowerPoint.

As you know, currently when you import a QuickTime file, Office apps usually complain because they try to play the QuickTime file with Microsoft’s media player. Unless you pick from a really pathetic range of codecs that are supported by both QuickTime and Windows Media, the file won’t play.

Microsoft’s solution is to either convert the QuickTime movie, or to create a hyperlink to the document. See this article from Microsoft’s knowledge base for details.

But the QuickTime ActiveX control could change all of this. It is now possible to embed a QuickTime movie into an Office document and have QuickTime handle it as if it were loading on a web page. Here are the steps, for those of you who have a Windows PC handy:

  • Choose View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox to display the ActiveX toolbar.
  • Click the “More Controls” button — a hammer and wrench crossed above an ellipsis.
  • Double-click “QuickTime Object” in the list of ActiveX controls.
  • Click in the slide to create a QuickTime ActiveX object.

At this point the ActiveX object is just an empty box with resizing controls.

- To set the size of the movie, right click the ActiveX object and choose “Properties” from the contextual menu.

Set the height and width of the movie accordingly. Try a height of 240 and width of 190 if you want to try the QT sample movie.

Now comes the fun part. To do anything interesting — like actually open or play the movie — you have to jump into Visual Basic. At least that’s the only way I’ve figured out so far.

- Right-click the ActiveX object and choose “View Code” from the contextual menu.

You’ll be placed in a “GotFocus()” event handler for the movie.

- You can now add any of the EMBED tag attributes using the following syntax:

Me.<QT object name>.AddParam <attribute name> <attribute value>

For example, try entering the following code:

Me.QTActiveXPlugin1.AddParam “SRC”, “C:Program FilesQuickTimeSample.mov”
Me.QTActiveXPlugin1.AddParam “CONTROLLER”, “FALSE”
Me.QTActiveXPlugin1.AddParam “AUTOPLAY”, “TRUE”

For other parameters, see this Web site:

- Choose Debug > Compile VBAProject.
- Choose File > Close and Return to Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Play the slide.

IT WORKS. It’s ugly, but hey, it’s a first step.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.