As a researcher, I often need to make presentation slides, and want to embed movies in my slides for better illustrations. After doing a little research, I converged to the solution described in this article.

If you want to benefit from this tutorial, here are two most important assumptions:

1. Slides are made with the LaTeX beamer package.
2. Movie format is assumed to be .flv (because I can’t play .mp4 movies on my Mac).

Accordingly, this tutorial has two parts:

1. How to embed .flv in beamer.
2. How to convert movie format to .flv.

Part I: Embed .flv movies in LaTeX

(Update: I have found a better option, please ignore this part and jump to Part III)

Step 1: Download the flashmovie.sty package file from CTAN

Remark: The flashmovie.sty package is written by Professor Timo Hartmann from TU Berlin.

Step 2: Download the player.swf file from https://archive.org/details/JwPlayerFiles. This file is needed by the JW Player engine in order to correctly compile the .tex file.

Step 3: Embed the .flv movie in your beamer. Here is an example .tex file.

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\RequirePackage{flashmovie}
\documentclass{beamer}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{embed a movie}
\begin{center}
\flashmovie[width=0.7\textwidth,engine=jw-player,auto=0,image=POSTER.jpg,controlbar=1,loop=0]{YOUR_MOVIE.flv}
\end{center}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Here YOUR_MOVIE.flv is the flv movie you want to embed, and POSTER.jpg is the image shown before the movie is played (note that the poster image is optional).

Step 4: Compile the .tex file into PDF with all the neccessary files in the same directory (i.e. flashmovie.sty, player.swf, YOUR_MOVIE.flv, POSTER.jpg). Then open the PDF file using Adobe Reader 9 or above

Remark:
1. more options of the \flashmovie command can be found in the flashmovie.sty file.
2. there are more different player options for engine other than the JW Player. For example, you may instead set engine=flv-player which uses an open-source player from http://flv-player.net. For this player another .swf file, player_flv_maxi.swf, is needed.

Part II: Convert movie formats to .flv

The software used to convert movie formats is FFmpeg. This is a free and open-source software.

Assuming you are using Mac OSX like me, here are the steps:

1. Make sure you installed Homebrew on your Mac, for details go to http://brew.sh/.
2. Install ffmpeg by running brew install ffmpeg in command line.
3. Convert movie formats using the ffmpeg command.

An explanation of the ffmpeg options can be found here. (Also a helpful article if your are using Windows or Linux.)

An example command that I used to convert an .mp4 file to .flv:

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ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -c:v libx264 -vf scale=-1:270 -ar 22050 output_file.flv

Some explanation of the command

• -i input_file.mp4: specify the input file
• -c:v libx264: set video codec to be libx264
• -vf scale=-1:270: set resolution of output file, -1 means to maintain aspect ratio, 270 indicates the vertical resolution is 270p. (1080p is Full HD.) If not specified, resolution remains unchanged.
• -ar 22050: set the audio sampling frequency. If don’t want any sound, use -an flag instead.
• output_file.flv: specify output file and format

Part III: Embed .flv movies in LaTeX (To replace Part I)

(Updated 1/19/17)

I have used the following movie embedding option a couple times before I posted this article, but I didn’t summarize it back then and forgot about it. Now memory strikes back.

The media9 package is the best option so far for embedding movies in beamer. Here is an example .tex file to do it:

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\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{media9}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{embed a movie}
\begin{center}
\includemedia[
	width=0.4\linewidth,height=0.3\linewidth,
	activate=pageopen,
	addresource=YOUR_MOVIE.flv,
	flashvars={
	   source=YOUR_MOVIE.flv
	}
]{\includegraphics[height=0.3\linewidth]{POSTER.jpg}{VPlayer9.swf}
\end{center}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

A couple remarks about this example:

1. Compile the .tex file into .pdf with all neccesary files (YOUR_MOVIE.flv, POSTER.jpg) in the same folder
2. POSTER.jpg is the image displayed before YOUR_MOVIE.flv is played, and is included using the \includegraphics command from the graphicx package. The poster image is optional, you may intead use a {} (before the {VPlayer9.swf}) to leave it blank.
3. VPlayer9.swf is the video player. You may use a fancier player StrobeMediaPlayback.swf and correspondingly in the flashvars options change source=... into src=.... Or if you are embedding audio, use APlayer9.swf.
4. Embedding YouTube video would be a piece of cake with this package, here is an example given in the official documentation:

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\includemedia[
  width=0.6\linewidth,height=0.3375\linewidth, % 16:9
  activate=pageopen,
  flashvars={
    modestbranding=1 % no YT logo in control bar
    &autohide=1 % controlbar autohide
    &showinfo=0 % no title and other info before start
    &rel=0      % no related videos after end
  }
]{}{http://www.youtube.com/v/r382kfkqAF4?rel=0}

5. Go to the CTAN page to find the complete documentation for media9.

Hope this is helpful!