When I heard that MS had greatly improved this in PP 2010 I was really looking forward to trying it out. I needed to put together a presentation for this weekend and had a couple of vids to add, so this week I got my opportunity. Inserting is as simple as going to Insert>Video, and of course there's all the standard stuff like whether to start on click or automatically, looping, playing full screen, and even adjusting playback volume. You can trim the start and end points too.
On my first effort I tried it with MPEGs (exported from PRE7). They did work, but they took too long to load when I wanted them to play. The first was a clip of about 1 minute long and it took about 20 to 30 seconds to load. The second was about 2 minutes long and it took so long that I finally gave up waiting on it. I think I waited at least 2 minutes before I realized that there was no way this would be acceptable. It was about this time that I discovered that there's a new "feature" called Optimize Media Compatibility" which can be found under File>Info. According to the help file, here's what it does:
To avoid playback issues when your PowerPoint presentation contains media, such as video or audio files, you can optimize the media files for compatibility. This makes it easy to share your presentation with others or take it with you to another location (perhaps to use a different computer to present it elsewhere) and your slideshow will play correctly.
Well heck, it sounded like just what I needed and I figured I might as well make my files compatible, so I clicked away. It took a couple of minutes, and when it was done I went to the show to see what wonders it had performed. My videos looked like one of those license plates that have been obscured so that you can't begin to tell what's on them - except the whole video looked that way, with some extra blur thrown in for good measure. Maybe my videos were now compatible, but they were useless for viewing. Time to start over. Fortunately it hadn't made any changes to the original videos; it must have created embedded copies.
I decided that for some reason PP didn't like MPEGs. On a hunch I went back and exported them as AVIs and tried them again. Oddly enough, these much larger files worked very well. They started quickly, played smoothly,and gave me no problems. The extra file size didn't make me any difference, so I considered it problem solved. But just for the heck of it I saved the file under a new name and decided to try the "Optimize Media Compatibililty" thing on these AVIs. It went better this time. They looked okay when I played them, except that they were jerky, almost as if they were starting and stopping for very short periods as they played. I can't say I'm impressed with the compatibility thing.
By the way, there's a second item under Info called "Compress Media." It's supposed to "save disk space and improve playback performance by compressing your media files." However, there's also the caveat that "Compression might affect media quality." I think I'll leave things as they are, thank you.