<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.12.1"> </HEAD> <BODY> 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!) <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD> -- Michael T. Richter <<A HREF="mailto:ttmrichter@gmail.com">ttmrichter@gmail.com</A>> (GoogleTalk: ttmrichter@gmail.com) There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. (Charles Hoare) </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML>