Can you guys point me out a component (either activex or .net) to
convert ppt to video. Google fond me several applications to do so...
Not a single component, though!
I don't know of any component that would do that (but then i have never
really looked for one).
To convert ppt to video, you'll first need to extract the slides from the
ppt file as images. If the user has powerpoint installed on their machine,
you can do that quite easily using the Office APIs (I've done that, no big
deal, a few lines of code). If you need something that works without
powerpoint installed, you'll need to buy a third party library that can
work with powerpoint files without needing powerpoint itself. These are
usually very expensive (or even insanely expensive if you need to deploy
them on each of your users machines). See
<
http://www.aspose.com/Products/Aspose.Slides/Default.aspx> for example.
Then, you'll need to generate a video file out of the set of images you've
got. There might be sample code or a library available out there to do that
(haven't looked for them). If you can't find anything that does that, you
can do it yourself using DirectShow. The DirectShow API is a hell of a mess
and is COM based so you can't access it from C# directly, you'll have to go
through managed wrappers. Luckily, somebody wrote them for you:
<
http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/>. The DirectShow SDK and
documentation is contained in the latest Platform SDK that you can download
from MSDN. Discussions about DirectShow take place on
microsoft.public.win32.programmer.directx.video.
Obviously, the solution described above will only allow you to generate a
video of static slides. You'll loose all the animations that were in the
original powerpoint file. If you need to generate a video that includes all
the original animations then i'm pretty sure that it's going to be an awful
lot more work.
