Hi
I am working on a VSTO PowerPoint 2010 add-in which will allow the user to playback a media object (video or audio) in a windows form using windows media player control.
In which way can I extract the embedded media object an play it back to the user?
I have access to the objects name, will that be enough to get to the embedded object?
Kinda yes and no.
The "No". Through VBA and VSTO, the answer is no or at least I've never seen it done before and have no idea. I've looked at this before and didn't find it to be possible.
The "Kinda Yes". Any embedded media in 2007/2010 can be extracted through Open XML. Here's where the "kinda" comes in - you can extract it so long as you know what you're extracting. Sounds easy enough, but it's not. When you insert a video or audio piece, it gets embedded into a shape. That shape is given a name[1], which is the file name of the audio/video file. So if I insert the sample video that comes with Win7, my shape name that holds the video is "wildlife.wmv". It can easily be renamed by an end user who knows how to do so (the Selection Pane in the client) and in that case, it would be impossible to find based on just having the name.
But if it hasn't been renamed, you would open an in-memory copy of your .pptx in Open XML, search on the name in each of the slides in the /ppt/slides/ folder and once found, use it's relationship Id to locate it's name in the /ppt/media folder. Then you can pull it out, save it to disk, play it, etc.
1 PowerPoint, however, renames the file based on an internal naming convention. My "wildlife.wmv" is renamed "media1.wmv" inside the package. Subsequent media items would be named media2.wmv, media1.mpg, etc.