Convert Videos with FFMPEG to PowerPoint 2016 compatible video format [closed]

Question

I am trying to convert a bunch of videos to a video format that is natively supported by PowerPoint 2013/2016 on a Windows 7 system.

Microsoft recommends on their website mp4 with h264 and aac.

Video and audio file formats supported in PowerPoint

In PowerPoint 2013 and later, and in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, for the best video playback experience, we recommend that you use .mp4 files encoded with H.264 video (a.k.a. MPEG-4 AVC) and AAC audio. In PowerPoint 2010, we recommend that you use .wmv files.

We recommend using .m4a files encoded with AAC audio. In PowerPoint 2010, we recommend that you use .wav or .wma files.

Audio is not important for me. I tried to convert my videos with ffmpeg using the following options:

ffmpeg -i Input.avi -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 -c:a copy Output.mp4

However I cannot import the video to PowerPoint 2016 (32 or 64bit, I tried both). I always get a missing codec error.

PPT Error when including video files

Has anyone successfully encoded videos to a natively supported PowerPoint video format (on Windows)?

Answer 1

I found a solution that works for me:

I forced ffmpeg to use the 'high' profile of h264 and the aac audio codec. Because the high profile doesn't support any chroma planes, I selected as pixel format YUV 4:2:0

ffmpeg -i Input.avi -c:v libx264 -preset slow  -profile:v high -level:v 4.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 22 -codec:a aac Output.mp4

Now it works in PP 2016 64bit on Windows 7 64bit.