We had a guest speaker the other week coming to give a presentation. He'd alarmed us by saying he had two videos to show which were currently on his phone. Eventually he got them into his .ppt which he sent in advance. Our Mac colleague couldn't get them to play. He sent me a copy. It turned out they were some Microsoft format.
LO on my main laptop (Linux of course) would play them but they both insisted on playing twice. Fortunately VCL transcoded them to mp4 (at a fraction of the former file size) which played OK, including playing sound to external speakers, so I swapped them for the original versions and saved as an Impress file. I took my laptop along to the talk just in case.
As it turned out the speaker brought his own laptop - I didn't look too closely but I think it may also have been a Mac - so they decided to use that. His laptop couldn't get sound out to a set of external speakers. These decisions were made while I was busy sorting out the presenter's mic. The situation was salvaged by borrowing a very tinny and not very powerful Bluetooth speaker.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
