Recently at work, I needed to record some screen captures and embed them into a powerpoint document. No sweat, right? Well, first I had to find software to do the screen capture (video not audio). Then, I had to embed it into powerpoint. I had used CamStudio with great success in the past so I used it.
Well, when I first did it, everything worked great. However, as time went on, my video began to thrash (not play cleanly). It did it sometimes but not others. This was a pain.
I ended up an assigned an action to an item (right-click and choose action settings) to launch Media Player Classic. Why not use Windows Media Player? I tried; however, I couldn’t be certain that the exe would be in the same place all of the time. I couldn’t just copy it because it requires too many dlls to be registered, etc…. MPC has a nice set of command line arguments (including having the player quit once it played the video once) that made it all possible.
Thanks for no help Micro$oft. Thanks to the Free/Open Source Software community to rising to the occasion!