- So you need to present a video to a group of people online
but when you play it on your computer
and share it with your desktop,
it's laggy and dropping frames for everyone,
or maybe it's missing the audio track.
Well in this remote working tip,
I'll show you a simple trick that will correct these issues
so everyone can watch your video without any lag
or any audio problems.
And because this is Mechanics,
I'm going to also explain what's causing this lag
and the drop frames and audio issues
when you share a video from your desktop.
So when you share your desktop with a video playing,
you're fighting a few challenges.
First, the video itself is decoding on your screen.
So whether that's a local file
or playing from the web,
like YouTube or Microsoft Stream,
then when you share the video from your desktop,
it's actually going up into the cloud
and then sending it back down from the cloud
to your audience's devices,
and there it needs to decode the video
and they need to be able to watch it.
So, as I talk you're actually seeing the difference
between what I'm seeing on the presenter's machine
and what your audience might be seeing
with two different connection speeds.
Now, all these encoding and decoding hops,
along with your connection speeds
for downloading and uploading and then re-downloading
and the content itself contribute to the lag
and the dropped frames.
Now, I've been on a lot of calls
even where people have gigabit upload and download speeds,
and it's still going to be problematic.
So how do you then solve for this?
Well, the key here is to eliminate the number of hops,
and we'll use web streaming for that.
Like you'd get natively, for example,
using YouTube or Netflix.
Now these platforms also do something
that's called transcoding
which means that they can elegantly drop
to a lower resolution
and then radically reduce the requirements
on connection speeds, really,
ultimately to minimize lag.
So back to our meeting example,
theoretically you could share a hyperlink out
for your online video during a presentation,
and just ask everyone to follow that link at the same time
and watch it.
And that would eliminate two hops,
but that's not a great solution.
There's a much better way
to synchronously stream your content,
and the trick here uses PowerPoint
along with online video streaming for your video.
So it accomplishes the same effect as asking everyone
to stream from a link at the same time,
all with the benefits of just having one hop.
But importantly, you're in control
as the presenter of the timing and the experience.
And you can do this with PowerPoint on the web
or the PowerPoint desktop app.
So I'll start with PowerPoint on the web,
and this works with online video
and you just need to have the web URL for your video ready.
In my presentation,
I'll click Insert, then Online Video.
And you'll see it works for links on YouTube,
SlideShare, Vimeo, and even Stream videos.
I'm going to paste in the YouTube URL first,
and then I'll hit Insert.
And now I'll stretch it,
and fill the entire slide in my case.
And you can test this out
and everything looks like it's working.
So now I'll create a new slide.
And now I'm going to jump over to Microsoft Stream
and I'm going to grab my next video URL.
And this is great for internal company presentations,
and you can upload your own locally stored videos to it
if you have a streaming video
that isn't already hosted somewhere online.
Next, just find your video.
This one happens to have all company permissions
so that everyone in my company can play it.
Hit Share and then copy that direct link.
Now, back in PowerPoint,
I'll follow the same steps from earlier.
Click insert, then Online Video
and I'll paste in that URL from Stream, hit Insert again,
and then stretch it to cover the full size of the slide,
and then I'll try it out.
Okay, so let's see how this works then
when presenting in Microsoft Teams for an online meeting.
So what I'm going to do now is join a meeting
that's already in progress.
And I can see that Megan and Adele
are already in my meeting.
And I'm recording their experiences
on their devices running Teams as well,
like I did before.
Adele is using Teams with a web client
and Megan is using Teams with a desktop client.
For my PC, I'm going to click into the share tray,
scroll down to PowerPoint Live,
and there's the presentation I was just working on.
So I'm going to select it.
So when I get to the slides of the videos embedded,
I can just hit the play button to start the video.
And it works, and you'll see the video play
with Megan and Adele's screens as well.
Now everything is synchronized
and there's zero lag for either of them.
And I can advance to my Stream video
and it works in a very similar way.
And I'm playing directly, in this case,
from Microsoft Stream.
But there is one more thing I want to show you
in PowerPoint Rich Client,
which is you can also insert videos
that are stored on your local hard drive.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit Insert,
and then video in this device.
I'm going to go ahead and choose All Hands and insert that,
that's an MP4 file.
And now if I go over to Teams,
what I can do here is
I can actually just either go to my OneDrive
and see my recently used presentation right here
or I can actually upload it from my computer.
Now I'm going to ahead and open that, the offline copy,
and you'll see depending on the file slide,
this will take a few moments for it to upload.
But when it's up there,
it'll be streaming as well from the web
so you've got the same streaming experience
even though you've uploaded from a local copy of PowerPoint.
And there it is.
And just to be clear,
all of these options are also playing audio
so you have the full fidelity experience
with video and audio streaming directly from the web.
even like you see here, using the Rich Client
and uploading that file as an offline file
as part of the meeting.
So the next time that you present a video
from a Teams meeting,
remember this trick using PowerPoint Live
and Microsoft Teams
to stream your video directly from the web.
So that was just another remote and hybrid working tip
to help you make your online presentations with video
as accessible as possible
regardless of your connection speeds
or your audience's connection.
For more tips like this,
be sure to check out our entire series
at aka.ms/WFHMechanics.
Subscribe to our channel if you haven't yet.
And as always, thanks so much for watching.