[Tex/LaTex] Embedding videos and animations

animationsbeamer

I'm aware that it's possible to embed some kinds of videos and animations in LaTeX files (using the beamer or prosper classes) but I couldn't locate good documentation on this. My web searches returned a list of scattered forum questions and answers.

Could anybody give a link to some help or documentation page that systematically deals with the various ways of embedding videos and animations, the file types that work, etc.?

Best Answer

I'm personally only familiar with doing this in Beamer, which uses the multimedia package, distributed as part of Beamer itself. (Although it can be used in normal documents as well, independently from the rest of Beamer) The canonical reference on how to use the multimedia package is the Beamer user's guide, section 14.1, but basically it boils down to using the command

\movie[options]{placeholder box}{movie filename}

The placeholder box is some text or other content (could be an image, for example) that determines the size at which the multimedia file is shown.

The multimedia file can be shown either with an external viewer application, which launches when you click on the appropriate part of the PDF file, or directly in the PDF viewer itself. In both cases, though, this functionality is only supported by certain PDF viewers, mostly Adobe Reader. The file types it is able to display depend on the capabilities of the PDF viewer, or if using an external viewer, on which viewer program is being used.

A quick search on CTAN turns up a possible alternative, media9 (which supersedes the old movie15 package). According to the documentation, its main command is

\includemedia[options]{alt content}{media file}

and it seems to offer some of the same main features as Beamer's multimedia. However, I've never used this one myself so I can't say anything about it that isn't mentioned in the package documentation.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Disabling beamer animations easily

I guess there are at least three alternatives for your problem, the four slides in the following example all do the same:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Darmstadt}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
    \item first one
        \pause
    \item second one
        \pause
    \item third one
        \pause
    \item fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
    \item<1-> first one
    \item<2-> second one
    \item<3-> third one
    \item<4-> fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
    \item<+-> first one
    \item<+-> second one
    \item<+-> third one
    \item<+-> fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}[<+->]
    \item first one
    \item second one
    \item third one
    \item fourth one
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

the first one is you solution
the second one tells at which slides to appear, <3-> meaning all starting from the third one
the third one is used to increase the counter beamerpause (=1 at beginning of frame) by one at each encounter
the fourth one (probably the one you would go for) sets the "increase beamerpause" as a default behaviour for all list items

Edit 1: You can also set the behaviour from the fourth example as general. All frames following \beamerdefaultoverlayspecification{<+->} will set pauses for every actionenv environment and every \item. To be in effect globally, you need to set this outside of a frame, e.g. as the first line after \begin{document}, before the first frame.

[Tex/LaTex] Beamer Animations: How to simulate terminal input and output

For simulating terminal output you will have to maintain a line buffer. In the example below I am using the sequence data type of LaTeX3 for this purpose. A minipage of given width and number of lines height is used to mimick the terminal window. If the number of lines in the buffer goes past the height of the minipage, the top line in the buffer is removed.

EDIT: New command \clearbuf clears the line buffer. Recommended use before first \scroll in an animateinline environment and to simulate clear (screen) shell command.

EDIT 2: This new version allows for ''multiline'' text as argument to \scroll. However, line breaks must be explicitly denoted in the argument using a marker string. The default is §§ which is rarely seen on terminals. But any user defined sequence of letters is possible. User defined marker strings must be passed as optional first argument, enclosed between [ and ] to \scroll.

EDIT 3: Note that macros within the text argument of \scroll are expanded before being added to the line buffer. The reason is to make macros which are called more than once but change their content between calls to \scroll, such as the line numbers \i in the example, work correctly.

Use \noexpand if you want to defer expansion of macros to the time when the whole line buffer is typeset. This is useful for escaping special characters or for text formatting macros (colour, typeface). See the updated example.

\documentclass[dvisvgm]{article}
\pagestyle{empty}

\usepackage{courier}
\usepackage{animate}  
\usepackage{expl3}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%  
%commands for simulating terminal in/output  
%\scroll[<line separator string>]{<width as TeX dim>} 
%                             {<number of lines>}{terminal text line}  
%\clearbuf  %clears line buffer  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%  
\ExplSyntaxOn
\seq_new:N\g_linebuffer_seq
\seq_new:N\g_inputline_seq
\newcommand\scroll[4][§§]{
  \seq_set_split:Nnn\g_inputline_seq{#1}{#4}
  \seq_map_inline:Nn\g_inputline_seq{
    \seq_gput_right:Nx\g_linebuffer_seq{##1}
    \int_compare:nT{\seq_count:N\g_linebuffer_seq>#3}{
      \seq_gpop_left:NN\g_linebuffer_seq\dummy
    }
  }
  \fbox{\begin{minipage}[t][#3\baselineskip]{#2}
    \ttfamily
    \seq_map_inline:Nn\g_linebuffer_seq{\mbox{##1}\\}
  \end{minipage}}
}
\newcommand\clearbuf{\seq_gclear:N\g_linebuffer_seq}
\ExplSyntaxOff

\begin{document}  

  \begin{animateinline}[controls,loop]{1}  
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{cat a}  
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{cat b} 
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{John§§Linda§§Albert§§Francis}  
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{ln -s a empty.txt}
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{md5sum empty.txt}
    \newframe
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e  empty.txt}
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{md5sum b}
    \newframe
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{88a1d2cf7920275378bebdf438bae941  b}
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{clear}\clearbuf  
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{}\clearbuf
    \newframe  
    \multiframe{10}{i=1+1}{
       \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{\noexpand\# Line \i}
    }  
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{clear}\clearbuf  
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{}\clearbuf
  \end{animateinline}  

  \begin{animateinline}[controls,loop]{1}  
      \clearbuf\scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{cd /usr/bin}
    \newframe  
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{echo \noexpand\$PWD} 
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{/usr/bin}
    \newframe
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{ls -l md5sum} 
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{% 
        -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30172 Dec 14 2010
        \noexpand\bfseries\noexpand\color{red}md5sum
      } 
    \newframe
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{clear}\clearbuf
    \newframe 
      \scroll{0.9\linewidth}{8}{}\clearbuf
  \end{animateinline}  

\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Disabling beamer animations easily

[Tex/LaTex] Beamer Animations: How to simulate terminal input and output

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