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I tested version 2.5 on April 23, 2005 and found it to be effective but with some rough edges. Its player plays a presentation as its screen capture codec captures whats playing.

The upper end of the capture rate settings, 60 frames per second, results in a better/smoother video after being processed through Movie Maker to a movie file. The Power Point slides, transitions, sound effects, music background are captured into an AVI file, using your choice of compression codec.

The rough edges included a dissolve transition in the presentation sometimes taking much, much longer to play in the app's viewer during the screen capture session... (uncompressed video file capture seems to work best). The rough edges are not critical as there are plenty of options to work around them.

(2) - Save the Power Point slides as jpgs and import those into Movie Maker. In Power Point go to Files -> Save As. On the Save dialog, change the file type to: "JPEG File Interchange Format (jpg)"

(3) I received an email on 5/29/05 from someone who tried and enjoyed PresenterSoft, saying that it worked far better than CamStudio or Camtasia when converting a fairly complex presentation.

7/27/07 forum post: I use PPT quite a bit... I use Camtasia and it works great. I've tried a few PPT to AVI programs and they just don't seem to work very good for me, so I screen capture the show. One thing that livens up a PPT show is that you can insert flash files (get the free swiff point player and install) and when you do a 'slide show' 'view show' the flash will play....

I tried Windows Media Encoder 9 one time and it worked really good capturing the show/presentation. There is a trick you can use to get good resolution and a more efficient use of your computer....hold down the 'Ctrl' key and click on 'slide show' 'view show' that show will not be full screen but will play in the upper left quadrant. Capturing that smaller playback will be more smooth and will look great as a video.

7/31/03 - I would like to import a Power Point presentation into Movie Maker. When I attempt to import, an error message that the file cannot be imported or is corrupted pops up. I tried playing the ppt in media player (per Microsoft support) but it didn't work there either.

Microsoft Producer, a Power Point add-in, looks and acts like Movie Maker 2. A few notes about it: The video track items don't have to be left-justified like in MM2, transitions and effects are very similar to MM2, there is an additional track for slides, you can import Power Point ppt files, there is an HTML track for web pages, you can import version 9 WMV files, music files can be in MP3 format, there are no text effects like in MM2 (but you have Power Point slides), and you can save files as WMV format up to a resolution of 800x600 pixels.

The saved production makes a lot of integrated files for a web page, with an embedded viewer. The WMV file in the package is a version 8 one, playable on Macs (I think) and older versions of the Windows Media Player. The file can be imported into MM2. If you work on Windows 2000 at work, you can use Producer and bring home the WMV files for use in MM2 movies.

(Microsoft) You can also save your Power Point slides as jpgs and import those into Movie Maker.