Saturday, September 11, 2010

Once More! Once More!! Once More!!!

On popular demand, …wait a minute! no one demanded this… ok, then scratch that!

One of my ex-room-mates (let us call him SD) enquired of me a couple of days ago if I knew how to embed videos in PDFs using LATEX! I responded (and I’m paraphrasing here) I‘d be highly high if such a thing was possible! And then he said, “Apparently, it can be done by using the package called movie15…” Holy smoly (what the hell does that mean?), I had to try that and yesterday I was so high that I did try that. I had to be high because I see no reason whatsoever why I would’ve done what I did whose outcome is no more thrilling than comparing a poem to a walk on a narrow dirt-trail and which results in just another repeated end-of-the-post-link!

Anyway, the video embedding is pretty simple (no spaces after '\'):
\ begin{figure}[h]
\ includemovie[poster,text={Movie}]{5cm}{5cm}{mov.mp4}
\ end{figure}

It seems to me that any sort of movie (like .avi, .mp4, .mpg, .wmv) can be embedded in the .pdf file. Moreover, the actual video files do not need to tag along with the .pdf file. The only thing that is required is that you open it using Adobe® Reader and the system you are running has the ability to decode that particular embedded video format. And voila! You’ve got your hands on a dynamic, self-contained, portable document in a file (this sentence construction leaves much to be desired!). Who’d’ve thought that one would live to see this day? Well, fortunately, you have lived to see this day and the proof is:

Dedicated to SG

3 comments:

  1. I was actually surprised that even fairly big video files (mine were about 110 MB) could be embedded quite easily and worked without problems. Unlike Word of course :)

    Btw, your paper on THE theory is fantastic :D

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  2. It was very fast of you to land on my post and read The Paper and comment! I'm impressed, touched, moved and the likes...

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  3. Regarding the paper-reading speed: that was because I couldn't understand most of it. But that was the point of the paper I guess?

    Still funny though :)

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