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I recently got a new computer and so installed MacTeX 2011, previously I had been using the 2009 version. I have used the TeXLive utility to bring the 2011 version up to date today.

I use XeTeX with the beamer package to create presentations and need to occasionally embed movies. I used to be able to do the following with my 2009 installation:

%!TEX TS-program = xelatex 
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
\frametitle{Movie Test}
\includemovie[poster,text={Tacoma Narrows}, mouse, repeat,controls]{.5\linewidth}{.375\linewidth}{tacoma.avi}

Here "tacoma.avi" can of course be any .avi movie, I used a DivX 4.1.2 encoding. I downloaded the file movie15_dvipdfmx.sty from http://asymptote.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/asymptote/trunk/asymptote/patches/

In the new installation, I need to replace the document class with


i.e., I need to drop the "[dvipdfmx]" option. This is fine by me. The code still compiles, but when I open the resulting file in Adobe reader 10.1, I get an error message: A window titled "Warning: JavaScript Window -" pops up and says "Expected a stream object." The movie is not shown.

Furthermore, I just checked the file size: the .avi movie should be included inside the pdf container of the compiled TeX file, but this evidently doesn't happen, as the .pdf file is only 6 kb large.

Everything still works fine in the 2009 installation. I understand that the file "movie15_dvipdfmx.sty" is two years old and perhaps incompatible with TeXLive 2011, but there seems to be no newer version available. Can I make the above code work in some way with TexLive 2011? If not, what are my options for embedding movies in the XeTeX+beamer set-up?

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1 Answer 1

I used to get same error but it is difficult to remember now what was the reason. There some things to check.

  1. First, I would try to compile same file with pdflatex and standard movie15 package instead of movie15_dvipdfmx.

  2. Second, I would try a different codec. My experience learned me that not every codec is suitable for embedding movie into pdf. After many experiments I stopped at xvid. It for sure works with Adobe Acrobat 10. For Adobe Acrobat 9 I used a different codec which does not work under version 10.

By the way, run|stop botton produced by

\movieref[pause]{movie-label}{Run Video}

is not working in my case if my source file is compiled with XeLaTeX whereas is does work as described in movie15 manual is it is compiled with pdflatex.

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