Videos are great ways to share ideas on the Web. Create one, upload it to your server or a video hosting service, like YouTube, and embed the video in a blog or other type of Web page.
NOTE: PowerPoint for Mac can export recorded slideshows to MP4 and MOV videos, but the audio may not be included in the video.
Turning a presentation into a video is a great way to share it, and if audio is included in the presentation, converting it into a video format is usually an effortless way of preserving the animation and audio of the original file. Currently, only Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows and Apple Keynote have easy ways to convert presentations to videos.
The current versions of LibreOffice Impress do not have this feature without adding a plugin. It has many of the same features as PowerPoint and several that the Microsoft application does not.
However, exporting to a video format has been one that has not been implemented. It also doesn’t have a feature to record a slideshow. Recording a slideshow allow the slides, animations in the slides, and narrations to be packaged together so viewers can experience them together as a presentation.
PowerPoint for Windows allows users to record slideshows with animations and narrations. Then they can easily export the slideshow to an MP4 or WMV video. The videos have the narrations and animations.
Impress exports presentations to SWF, which supports Flash. SWF is not used as much as it was in the past.
Impress has had something similar to a video export feature before LibreOffice came into existence, and there was only OpenOffice. It can export to SWF (small web format).
SWF is not like MP4 or WMV. It was designed for animations on the Web, but it can present video content. The format is a container for Flash, which was popular for decades and is still used on many Websites.
However, due to advances in HTML, security problems, and other issues, SWF has lost popularity. Recent versions of Web browsers require users to activate the plugin to view Flash documents.
When an Impress presentation is exported to an SWF document, it still requires a special application to play it. It cannot be opened in a Web browsers; they treat it as a download. The SWF document acts like a slideshow presentation, in the SWF application, rather than a video.
There is a plugin that has been created for Impress. It was written for OpenOffice, but it also works in LibreOffice.
The plugin puts an Export to video item in the File menu of Impress. Clicking it will export the video to AVI (Audio Video Interleave).
The plugin only works for Windows and Linux versions of Impress. Mac users can’t use it.
The exported video also doesn’t include themes or animation, so the video will have a plain, white background, and it won’t have an attractive appearance. PowerPoint’s ability to export presentations to video gives it a clear advantage over its open-source counterpart. It puts the presentation application into a different league.
Conclusion
Impress needs this capability. While it can create documents that can be opened by PowerPoint for Windows and PowerPoint can be used to create videos, this is option is only available to users who have access to PowerPoint for Windows.
Those who use Mac or a Linux distro, and do not have access to PowerPoint for Windows, currently have to find another way of making videos out of presentations. It is more difficult to do.
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