Turning PowerPoint into movies

I have been searching for many months for a way to convert PowerPoint presentations to some movie format. Why, you might ask? Firstly, PowerPoint files don’t play the same way on different computers, particularly if you are timing slide transitions to an audio track. And secondly, PowerPoint can do some nice visual effects, for instance with text, which are quite difficult in the average low-end to mid-range video programme.
There are some commercial programs which turn PPTs into a movie. For instance, Leawo boasts that it can convert PPT to almost any popular movie format – and there sure are plenty of them: AVI, WMV, MPG, FLV, VOB, MOV and on it goes.
That seems to be the cleanest and simplest method, but being stubborn I looked round for free software to do the job. It would appear there is no one-step program. But it can be done in several steps.
iSpring is a free extension which installs itself into PowerPoint. From within the PowerPoint, you can convert the presentation to a Shockwave Flash (SWF) file. As most web browsers can play flash movies, to play the file, drag its icon onto the icon of your favourite browser. You can also play the file without a browser using SWF Opener.
The next stage is to convert SWF to FLV format, and here there is a gap in the chain. None of the free programs I tried worked successfully on my computer. I finally went to Moyea and downloaded a trial version, which worked perfectly (but the full version costs US$30).
For the last step, I found that Leawo has a free FLV to AVI converter, which also works very well. An alternative is Pazera free FLV to AVI converter.
Considering all the hoops I had to jump through to get from PPT to AVI, the heavier weight Leawo looks like a good buy!
Talking of converting videos, what if you want to download and convert a YouTube video to watch on your iPod, cell phone, or maybe convert to another video type. You might want to try the freebie YouTube Downloader. It runs as a small applet and is exceedingly simple to use. You can convert to many different formats, including for the iPod, iPhone, cell phones, PlayStation Portable, as well as common PC formats including MPEG and Windows Media (.wmv).