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Abhay Patil
Asked: 2020-06-17 11:00:45 +0800 CST

Convert .pptx or .ppt files to mp4 on Ubuntu

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I have few slides sent by my professor. In those slides, each slide is embeded with an audio file. I want to view them as a video file.

In Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows, there is an option in export as to convert it to .mp4 format. What it does is make the slide as the image and puts the recorded voice as the audio file. And the output is a .mp4 file.

Is this type of export possible on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I have LibreOffice Impress in which under export as options, there is only a.pdf format option.

video libreoffice convert microsoft-powerpoint

2 Answers

  1. I use a workaround with the screen recording application - SimpleScreenRecorder

    • start your presentation in the full screen mode
    • start recording
    • stop recording when it's done

    It will allow you to record the presentation with animation/video in a mp4-file. But unfortunately I didn't manage to record the sound.

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  2. Late answer, I know. At the moment this possibility seems that has not been directly-implemented.

    Openoffice Extensions

    You may give it a look to the impress video converter extension.

    Command line with ffmpeg

    You can export the ppt(x) as pdf, sfw, gif, png, jpg, whatever..., and then convert the result in a video. (You may need imagemagick).

    Assuming you have installed on your system the right codecs (libx264 or better, I refer here explicitly to the encoding libraries) and that the images are named picture01.png ...
    you can use a command line similar to the following one:

    ffmpeg -r 1/10 -i picture-%01d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p video.mp4
    • -c:v libx264 : Output video codec (i.e h264) but if you have h265 is better.
    • -r 1/10 : Display each image for 10 seconds.
    • -r 30 : framerate of output video.
    • -pix_fmt yuv420p : Output video resolution (not really needed)

    There are tons of options. Moreover, with ffmpeg it is also possible to add audio tracks to a video.
    For example to add the audio of the file input.mp3 you can use:

    ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i input.mp3 -c copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 output.mp4

    Again there are tons of options (you can compact in only one command line, stretch the audio ...)

    Bonus: the following line will shorten of 20% a video and audio (note atempo=1.25 is 1./0.80 where 0.80 is the compressing ratio for video -- useless complication but it works in this way).

    ffmpeg -i output.mp4  -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=0.8*PTS[v];[0:a]atempo=1.25[a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]"  output_02.mp4

    Video Editing Programs

    As you see this is a path that may lead to use video editing programs such as avidemux, kdenlive...

    ScreenRecorder

    You can use a Screen Recorder (also know as screencast programs) as suggested from the other answer.
    Here a Comparison of screencasting software by wikipedia.

    Video conferencing software

    There is a wide number of Video conferencing software that allows to share your screen, add your audio and record the session. Pick one.
    (Among the others: Zoho Meeting, Zoom, FreeConference.com, BigBlueButton, FreeConferenceCall.com, Jitsi, Lifesize, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet, Skype, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Whereby)

    It may be useful the wiki List of video telecommunication services and product brands.
    Read the user agreement for any aspect related to confidentiality and privacy.

    The World WIDE Web

    A good number of sites offer for free and online the possibility to convert a powerpoint to mp4. A simple search on your preferred search engine will show you a bunch of them... and all your intentions of confidentiality and privacy may RIP.

    References (Some words more)

    1. How To Create A Video From PDF Files In Linux
    2. Add audio to video using FFmpeg
    3. Copying the audio without re-encoding

    Final remark

    Note that a pptx file is a zip file. If you rename into zip and you extract with its subfolders, you will be able to find the media included, original audio files too, and to use these to build your video.

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