A blast from my video encoding past has resurfaced. Three Faculty Academies ago, I spotlighted a program called Riva Producer Lite. It essentially lets you encode video into the FLV (Flash Video) format with an interactive component. You could create web linked "hot spots" right on top of the video, with very little programming. While they also made a more feature-filled version of Producer, they have made a stand-alone FLV Encoder freely available. I have been using the Sorenson Squeeze program to get very high quality FLV files, but the Riva encoder does a good job, especially for free.

What I didn’t realize about the Riva encoder is that encodes to and from FLV format. What does that mean to me and you? Well it means if you have an FLV video file you can transcode it from FLV to AVI or MPEG. You can then use the video in a program like PowerPoint. Just recently I did a screencast on using YouTube videos live in PowerPoint. Well, if you don’t want to rely on a live Internet connection for your videos in PowerPoint, you’ll want to download and then convert them into a format PowerPoint will recognize (FLVs are NOT recognized). The Riva FLV Encoder is a tool to do just that. Expect a screencast that will outline the steps necessary to get videos from YouTube and use them in PowerPoint.