Integrating Video into a Bundle of Documents

Report · May 10, 2023

Hi Fellow Adobe Dudes,

I have a question concerning linking video into PDF bundles (We use Adobe DC). I’m responsible for producing bundles of documents, and sometimes I need to include video footage. We typically upload the video to OneDrive and then insert a single page into the bundle and put the video details and video link on that page (this means we can paginate and index the video). OneDrive is normally OK for this sort of thing, but recently we have discovered that it struggles a fair bit with certain types of video. Does anyone have any suggestions for an alternative? Does Adobe have a better way to do this? (embedding the video using Rich Media isn’t an option for us because we need the video to be available to anyone we send the bundle of documents to, and because sometimes there’s just too much video.

The problem we had recently was a series of VSI Video Files would play but had no audio. We converted them to MP4 (though our Creative tools in Adobe wouldn’t recognize the VSI format for some reason) and the videos had picture & audio, but lagged terribly when played through OneDrive.

An Adobe solution would be ideal, but really any other suggestions are welcome.

Cheers!

Stephen.

Report · May 10, 2023

POINT OF CLARIFICATION:

I want people who receive the bundle to be able to play the videos with a click rather than have to download them.

Report · May 15, 2023

(Don't forget the Adobe Duddettes! 🙂 )

One possible workaround is to embed the videos in the PDF file itself, but as Attachments, and then create a link to them using a simple script. This would cause the files to open loaded using the local application that's associated with that file-type, whatever it may be.

Report · May 16, 2023

Dear Adobe Dudette, thank you for the suggestion! That would be a good solution for some of what we do, though recently I had over 150 videos to link and attaching them might make the file too large. Anyhow, I'm going to give this a go for smaller jobs and see how it works out. Thanks again!

Stephen G.

Report · May 16, 2023

(I'm not a Dudette, actually... but never mind)

You can't have it all... Either you keep the file size small and use links to a web-page, or make the file-size large by attaching the videos to it. But how is the latter any different than having them as separate files? The user will still have to download everything first for it to work...

Report · May 25, 2023

Thanks for the response!

At present we upload videos to OneDrive and link them into our PDF documents. This means when the person clicks on the link they can simply watch the video clip in OneDrive without having to download anything. The pnly problem is OneDrive can be a bit laggy and sometimes doesn't play the video or audio very well. So, it's another solution I'm looking for so that the end user doesn't have to download anything at all, they basically just "click & watch." If I embed 100 videos into a PDF, I suspect that's going to be horrendously huge, but I'm going to give it a go to see if it's a workable option.

Thanks again!

Stephen.