Libreoffice impress video playback problem [*Worked-around]

stinkwheel · Bovine Proctologist Joined: 12 Jul 2004 Karma :

A few linux geeks on here, I suspect this may be unsolveable as things stand but you never know your luck.

I'm setting up a lecture for Mrs stinkwheel on libreoffice impress. All going well.

I have a couple of videos in it which I have embedded in a slide.

These work perfectly on my Mint debian PC.

When I play them on Mrs stinkwheels Mint laptop (quiona LTS) they show up but the colours are misaligned giving a monochrome/blue appearing image with a red "ghost" image a few mm offset. Also a narrow, pixellated, multi-colour bar across the bottom of the video.
Does it both on the standard monitor and when used through a projector.

No screenshot I'm afraid, she took the laptop to work with her.

More details:

The videos play fine in totem video player which, as far as I'm aware, uses the same GStreamer as plays video embedded in libreoffice.

I have re-installed libreoffice, updated the system and reinstalled all the parts of GStreamer I could find in synaptix.

I have tried embedding the video as h.264/MP3 in .MP4 (video ripped directly from youtube using youtube-dl). In case of google shanannigans I saved a version exported from openshot as H.264/MP3 in an mpeg 2 wrapper. Also tried it using theora/.ogg as MPEG-2 which should be natively supported. Same result each time.

I suspect there is some inherant problem with either one of the GStreamer plugins on this system possibly an issue with libreoffice-avmedia-backend-gstreamer.

I'll probably report it as a bug once I've replicated it with some other video too.
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“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
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stinkwheel · Bovine Proctologist Joined: 12 Jul 2004 Karma :

Fixed.

Or more accurately, worked-around.

It seems it wasn't happy with the size of the video. Libreoffice Impress lets you resize the video in a slide by dragging the corners. It appears to have been playing part of the video in the resized dimensions and part of it (mostly red bits) in the dimensions specified in the video file but constrained by the resized dimensions.

So say the video file had been resized to fit in the slide neatly but was normally twice that size. The video was playing most of the image in the newly re-sized area but the red parts cropped rather than resized.

Odd, and it only does it on Mrs stinkwheels laptop, not on my desktop.

Anyway. I resized the video files to the dimensions of the slides and saved them using the native linux theora/vorbis .OGG format using the DV/DVD NTSC profile in openshot. Mainly because it is least likely to have a tantrum about these. I then inserted them in the slide unaltered. Perfect playback.

I suspect it would work with other formats too, the problem was the resizing to fit in the constraints of the slide, something about the setup on her laptop made it rezize parts of the video but crop other parts.

I have sent her away for her lecture with a .pdf of the slides and a folder of videos on a flashdrive in case of emergencies (leaving her laptop on the train would be my number 1 suspect rather than any software issues).

On a vaguely related theme, I had a good chuckle today. Mrs stinkwheel tried to print her lecture notes on our home network printer. More than once. Trouble is, she was 25 miles away at work, somewhat out of range for my wireless access point!

I had no idea until a dialogue popped up on the screen warning me the printer was out of paper. It had picked up the print job as soon as the laptop came ito range.

Not even mad.
____________________
“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

Taught2BCauti... · World Chat Champion Joined: 12 Jan 2012 Karma :

I had a similar video issue when using Impress, but my 'work-around' was to host the video clip on YouTube, and embed the link.

Some ebay sellers use a similar method to embed a video into an ebay listing - which is where I got the idea.

I haven't done much digging, but I think Impress handles some video formats better than others, e.g. flv seems to work better than MP4
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