So, you’ve downloaded a cool flash video from YouTube, and you want to insert it into your PowerPoint slide show. However, Microsoft PowerPoint gives you this error message: “PowerPoint cannot insert a movie from the selected file. Verify that the path and file format are correct, and then try again.”

The problem is, you cannot insert a .flv flash video directly into Microsoft Office’s application such as Word, PowerPoint or Excel. To do this, we need to re-encode the flash video to other format. In this post, I will show you how to easily re-encode a .flv flash video to .avi video (xvid+mp3) so that it can be inserted into a Microsoft Office’s document.

1. Download and install the latest MediaCoder Full Edition. MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution.

2. After you’ve installed MediaCoder, run the application. The first thing we need to do is to reset MediaCoder setting. To do this, go to File > Revert All Settings (1).

3. Click the Audio tab (2). Make sure the encoder is set to ‘LAME MP3’ (3). Set the ‘Rate Mode’ to ABR (4) and bitrate value to 94kbps (5) which is sufficient maintain the audio quality from a flash video.

4. Next, click on the Video tab (6). Follow this setting:

Mode: Two-Pass (7)

Format: XviD (8)

Container: AVI (9)

Source: MPlayer (10) (untick Auto Select)

Bitrate: 800kbps (11)

5. Click and drag the flv flash video that you want to re-encode into MediaCoder (12). Select the output folder (13), and click Start (14) to begin the encoding process of the .flv video to .avi video. After the encoding process finished, you can insert the encoded .avi video into Microsoft Office’s applications.

[Download: MediaCoder]