Why does OpenOffice.org suck worse than MS Office?

[NoOp]

On 06/10/2007 05:03 AM, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> So, here I am using Impress to make a presentation.  I want something
> simple: I want to play an audio file when a certain slide is loaded.  Do
> you think this is possible?  Of course it isn't!  Impress requires you
> to click on the inserted object to play media of any kind.
> 
> Well, OK, so I can live with that.  It's ugly, but I've gotten used to
> ugly when using F/LOSS.  After all there's no real incentive for people
> to do the extremely hard, fiddly, unpleasant and thankless task of GUI
> design, right?  Praise doesn't exactly fill the food bowl.  But
> functionality?  That should work out of the box, right?
> 
> Hah!
> 
> Follow the instructions in the help.  Insert a media player object.
> Give it the file it's supposed to play.  Run the slide show.  Watch the
> media player object turn into a grey rectangle with absolutely no GUI
> elements whatsoever.  Clicking on it?  Well, it does what you'd expect
> -- if OO.o were written by Al Quaeda terrorists.  Hard disk starts to
> grind.  A lot.  Simple text animations ("appear") that used to take a
> fraction of a second take forever.  A slide with five line items now
> takes over three minutes to display fully.  But there's no sound.
> 
> So what's the trick here?  How does one actually get an Impress
> presentation to play music?  (Or, worse, to play a movie!)
> 
> 

You are lucky if you are using Ubuntu's OOo... at least you can play
simple sound files in that version - Ubunto have modified it to do this
out of the box. If you use the standard OOo you need to install Sun's
JMF (Java Media Framework), modifify the soffice script file, set the
paths, etc., etc. (see pages 458-456 of the OOo User Guide). Now if
Ubuntu could just fix the broken wizards I'd move back to that version.

To play media for each slide (U)OOo in Impress:

1. Select Slide Show|Slide Transition
2. Modify transition|Sound - click on the dropdown and select 'Other
Sound' and select your sound file.