how i outsmarted powerpoint

I am making the switch from Keynote and my (increasingly) irritable Powerbook to PowerPoint and my brand new Windows 7 laptop. All my old presentations are in Keynote, and it is less than fun to convert them to PowerPoint so that I can steal slides from them in the present/future. Anyways, I was getting annoyed at PowerPoint for being retarded with regard to inserting videos. Apparently, PowerPoint uses something called the Media Control Interface to play videos inserted into PowerPoint rather than the ubiquitous Windows Media Player (see How PowerPoint 2003 Plays Multimedia Files in a Presentation). My videos were all encoded with the Xvid mpeg4 codec. They played in PowerPoint, but they looked rather crappy. The videos had more compression artifacts and fine lines looked pixelated.

Remembering that once upon a time I figured out that PowerPoint would play mpeg4-encoded videos if I changed the .avi extension to .mpg, I changed the extension on the videos to .mpg, and they played at a much higher quality, to me indistinguishable from how Windows Media Player plays them. Here's a screenshot of a slide with the last frame of the same video using the .avi extension (left) vs the .mpg extension (right).



I don't know what PowerPoint is doing differently with the mpg vs the avi extension -- is it using Windows Media Player within PowerPoint instead of Media Control Interface? No idea. Whatever, it looks a lot better.

By the way, so far, Keynote version a way long time ago is so far beating PowerPoint 2007 by a mile in my experience so far. Hopefully, I'll get more used to PowerPoint with practice. At least I don't have to use the Windows Equation Editor like in the days of yore. There is now a Latex Equation Editor that works great for me.