PowerPoint video to PDF

How to keep the videos when you save a presentation as PDF

Save as PDF in PowerPoint throws every video away and keeps only its still picture. Here the video file itself goes into the PDF, on the slide where it was.

1. Drop the .pptx file on the box above. It is not uploaded.
2. Read what was found: how many videos, and how big they are. For a big deck, choose High quality, smaller, or Small enough to email, and choose the language of the words under the video.
3. Press Make the PDF. Each slide becomes one page, and each video sits on its slide with a play button.
4. Save it, and send it the way you would send any PDF.

Where the video plays

Video inside a PDF is part of the PDF standard, but only some readers play it. It is best to tell the person you send it to.

Adobe Acrobat and the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, on Windows and Mac: the slide shows only the play button, and a click plays the video right on the slide. Acrobat may ask once whether to trust the document, and the answer is yes.

Open a PDF on this site: the video plays on the slide as well, in any browser, on a computer or a phone, and a Download video button saves it.

Preview on a Mac and the Files app on an iPhone cannot play it, and Preview will not open a file kept inside a PDF either, so they show no play button. In its place there is a Play video button that opens Open a PDF on this site in the browser: drop the PDF there and it opens on the whole screen at that slide, where the video plays and the arrow keys go on to the next slides. A line under it says so, and says the video also plays in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot play it or save it. Open the file in Acrobat Reader, which is free, or in Open a PDF on this site.

The words under the video

The Play video button and the line under it can be in English, French or Arabic, or in your own words. Your own words can be in any language written in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew or Arabic letters, and Arabic and Hebrew run right to left as they should.

Acrobat and Open a PDF on this site do not show these words, because there the video plays.

The size of the PDF

A video is far bigger than a page of slides. As they are puts each video in the PDF untouched, so a deck with a 40 MB video makes a PDF of a little over 40 MB. The size is shown before you make it.

High quality, smaller encodes each video again at a rate that still looks sharp on a slide, often half the size or less. A video that is already small enough is left as it is.

Small enough to email aims for a PDF under 20 MB, which fits the 25 MB most email accepts. A very long video may still not fit without looking poor; you are told when that happens, and a shared drive link is the better way to send it.

The videos are made smaller in your browser, with its own encoder, and never uploaded. A minute of video takes a few seconds to a minute.

What is carried over

Everything PowerPoint to PDF carries over: the text in every box with its size, colour and bullets, pictures, tables, backgrounds and whatever the template puts on every slide. On top of that, the videos and sounds that are inside the .pptx file.

A video that was only linked, not inserted, lives on the author's own computer and not in the file, so it cannot be carried over. You are told if there is one. Charts, SmartArt, animations and speaker notes are left out, as in PowerPoint to PDF.