Can we use media9 to show a video on a PDF but the video is not embedded to the PDF?

Question

I have video tutorials that I want to show in my presentation with beamer class. I don't want the video files get embedded to the PDF because they will make the PDF size very very huge.

If you know how the videos can be played on the HTML with a reference rather than embedding the video file to the HTML file, I want something like this to be applied to my PDF presentation. I just want to reference the video URL from my PDF presentation.

Shortly speaking, can we use media9 to show a video on a PDF but the video is not embedded to the PDF?

Uploading those videos to a web server might be difficult for me because internet connection is very slow and sometimes not available in the presentation room. :-)

Answer 1

Security measures of Adobe Reader prevent the built-in FlashPlayer from accessing files on the local disk. Only embedded files and those specified as a web URL are supported. However, a web server may be running on the local machine, serving media files residing in a dedicated folder.

Setting up a lightweight web server on a presentation laptop is easy.

I tested Nginx (open-source, BSD License) on Windows 7. It only needs to be unzipped, and nginx.exe can be started immediately without administration privileges. Media files to be served are put into the html subdirectory of the unzipped nginx-1.*.* directory.

Running a local web server may be beneficial in case of large media files, which will load much faster than big embedded files. Embedded files need to be completely extracted and uncompressed first before they can be loaded and displayed.

A minimal working example reads:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{media9}

\begin{document}
  \includemedia[
    width=0.6\linewidth,height=0.45\linewidth,
    activate=pageopen,
    flashvars={
       source=http://localhost/random.mp4
      &loop=true
    }
  ]{}{VPlayer.swf}
\end{document}

random.mp4 from the media9 installation was copied into the nginx-1.*.*/html directory.