Episode: 1885
Title: HPR1885: 64 - LibreOffice Impress - Multimedia
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1885/hpr1885.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:47:31

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This is HPR Episode 1885 entitled 64 Libra Office Impress Multimedia, and in part of the series, Libra Office,
it is hosted by a huker and in about 14 minutes long, the summer is,
using audio and video files in impress.
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Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our ongoing series,
Libra Office Impress. And what I want to do today is bring in something that really,
this is about the only place you would have room for it in an office suite and that's multimedia.
And that means audio and video. And in presentations, there can be places where you want to make use of
these kinds of things in some various and interesting ways. Now there are some limitations.
First of all, anytime you want sounds, whether from an audio file or as part of a movie file,
you kind of need to have the right hardware all along the chain. And that can mean a little
planning ahead. In many of the places where I do presentations, the video is all I have.
Most modern projectors, particularly in corporate meeting rooms, have the capability of playing audio
as well as video. On the other hand, some of the conferences I've presented at have borrowed
any old projector they can get for free. I've had problems just getting them to display video
properly, let alone play audio. The other variable you need to be concerned with is how your laptop
sends out AV information. If your video out is VGA only, as would be the case on older laptops,
well, that's a video only format and you would need to have a separate audio connection and cables.
Current DVI and HDMI outputs do in principle carry audio as well. I have seen some issues with
specific chipsets and cards. So again, I would do a little bit of testing here.
The bottom line is that this is a whole question in itself. And frankly, one I am not an expert on.
So if you want to do this, I suggest you try it with the laptop and projection equipment you plan to
use and see how it goes. If everything is up to date, modern hardware, you're probably going to be
successful, but the older the hardware, on either side, the more chance it will get.
Now, the next question you have is one of embedding your multimedia files into your presentation
versus linking to external files. There are pros and cons either way.
Linking to an external file makes your presentation file that much smaller.
And for sound or video files, you want to use on multiple presentations that can add up to a
major space savings. The downside is that you move the presentation file to another machine and
your AV files were on the first machine. Well, you've probably just broken the connection.
And then they're not going to work. There is one thing that can work nicely though, at least for
movie files you might want to call. And that is to use a hyperlink to a server.
So for example, let's suppose you want to call a video from YouTube. You could just copy the URL
for the video that you want to use. Then go to a blank slide.
And what you can do there is go to the insert menu, click hyperlink. This will bring up a window
where you can set up your link. So there's a couple of radio buttons that say either web or
FTP. So if it's YouTube, it would be web. And then under that target, and that's where you would put
the URL. Then in the text box, you can put in the text that you want to see on the slide that is
going to maybe say something interesting like Ted Talk on blah blah blah. So it's clear when people
see that what it is they're going to be looking at. So the other way you could do it is you could
put the text in first. And this would be best if you wanted to have your video inserted onto a slide
where maybe you had some other text or other objects or what have you. What you can do is type in
the text you want to use. And then go to insert hyperlink when you've selected the text and enter
the URL. Now you don't need to enter anything into the text field of the hyperlink window here
because it will apply the link to the text you selected. But if what you want is not on the internet,
you may want to use files available to you on your computer. One of the first things I consider
here is whether I might want to use these files again. If I think I might, it is worth creating
a gallery theme for them. If you have not looked at our tutorial on the gallery and themes,
we did that couple of lessons back. You might want to review it now. But in essence themes are
collections of objects. We first introduced them for collections of pictures, but they can collect audio
and movie files as well. As our earlier tutorial explains, the gallery contains a number of themes
that are built in. But in this case, we would want to create our own. I would probably want to do
at least two, one for audio and one for video, to collect the files I want to use. And while you
can pull files from any place, I like to create a directory and copy my files into that directory
because it makes managing things a little easier, at least I think so. So I created two directories
of my impressed tutorials section of my hard drive, one for audio and one for video and copied
into them five files each. The audio files were all MP3 and the video files were all MP4.
Now, these are very common file formats. I could have gone for AUG, but depending on who's
listening to this, they may or may not have experience working with those particular code X.
And this is probably a little more bullet proof. Now note, when these files get into the theme,
they will be identified by the file name. This is a good time to take a look. If your file name is
something fairly useless, like x23v17q.mp3, this will probably be a real good time to rename the file
to something more usable, like Fred's introductory remarks.mp3. So in the future, you'll know what the heck
these files are. So now I've got directories with files in them. So now I go to the gallery.
And the gallery is on the sidebar, as you may recall, and at the top there's a button called New
Theme. So first one I created was for audio files. So I gave it a name on the first tab.
And then on the second tab, I pointed to the directory I created that has the MP3 files.
This is where it gets a little tricky, because this part is way more complicated than it needs to be.
So first, in the file type drop-down, select mpeg, audio, parentheses, star.mp3, close parentheses.
This will bring up a window asking if you want to update the file list. Click yes.
It will appear to have done nothing. Click the find files button.
And in the window that comes up, navigate to the directory you created and place the files in.
Then click select.
And now at this point, you probably see a bunch of files here in this window. You're not done,
though. You still have to click add all to add them to your theme.
As I said, way more complicated than it needs to be.
So at this point, now you can click OK. You'll have a theme in your gallery with the name you gave it
and icons for five files in it. Repeat the above process for your movie files, and you will now have
two themes created. Now, you don't have to create a theme for one-off use of an audio or video file.
The idea here is that these files are ones that we might want to reuse in the future,
and this makes it easier. Now, when it comes to adding your files,
one thing you may run into, even if you gave them better names, is that you are still not
exactly sure what each file is, impress does have you covered. If you go to tools, media player,
it will open up a media player, then double click a file in the theme, and it will just play that
file. So you can hear the audio, watch the video, whatever, and know exactly what it is.
Now, adding it to a presentation. At this point, it's as simple as click and drag from the theme.
So you have a slide, and then you've got your gallery in the sidebar off on the right,
and you find the theme, and you just click and drag a file, and it goes onto the slide.
Now, if it's not in the gallery, and you want to add something, go to the insert menu,
to the movie and sound option, and navigate to the file you want.
Now, when you insert an audio file, there is an icon added to the slide, but you can move it
and put in text as well. And of course, when you insert a movie, a window for the movie is placed
on the slide. The thing you need to understand is that all audio and video files that are inserted
run automatically as soon as the slide is displayed in the slide show, and they stop as soon as
you jump to the next slide. So that's something you might want to keep in mind.
Oh, when you add the file, you will see a media player, and if you select the,
you will see the media player if you select the icon for the audio or the window for the video,
and when you say select, what we mean is that you have clicked on it to the point that there's
a border around it and the eight handles, and that means it has been selected. And when that happens,
the media player is going to appear, and usually on like the lower left of the screen,
you won't see it during the slide show. You see it here because you can make some adjustments
as to what happens when this file is played. There's the usual play, pause, and stop buttons.
And then there's one you can set for repeat if you want the file to keep playing.
It will stop, as I said, as soon as you go to the next slide. So it's not suitable for like a
background soundtrack while the presentation is running. Then there's a position slider that lets
you start the file from any point, not just in the beginning, and a timer window that shows you
where you are in the file. So what you could do is you could, let's say, there was some audio,
and it's like, I only want a certain amount of this audio, and it's one minute in. Well, you know,
you can listen to it and watch the timer window, and you see, ah, it's 59 seconds, and then move
the slider to the 59 seconds. And then when you get to that slide, it'll start at that point.
There's a mute button that can be handy if, for instance, you want a movie file to play without sound.
And then a volume slider, so you can adjust the volume of the audio that you're playing.
Finally, there's a scaling drop down. That's only available for movies. It doesn't make any sense
to have that for audio. So what does it all mean? I get to tell you this is,
this is a part of impress where I am not impressed. Okay. There are a couple of things.
PowerPoint, for instance, I know, has much more sophisticated multimedia capabilities.
So this is just an area where there has not been a lot of attention paid in LibreOffice.
I have frankly had a bit of trouble using these features. All with audio, video files play great
for me, but with audio, I've had like slowdowns and crashes and stuff. I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's
something about my setup, and it's going to work perfectly for everyone else. But I'm just reporting.
This is what I've run into. Now, if you're committed to using free software, I want you to know what
you can do. But this is really an area where I'm hoping to see the developers push this thing a
little bit further in the future. Of the components in LibreOffice, when you compare it to something
like Microsoft Office, there's differences. I would say writer is more capable than Microsoft
Word. I'd say Calc is about the same as Excel. Impress is one of those ones that just does not
measure up to PowerPoint. And so I'm going to say that. Calling it as I see it, but that's going
to be it for me on this one. So this is a hook up for hacker public radio signing off and reminding
you as always to support free software. Bye bye.
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