First read this page on adobe.com
With acrobat pro 9 you can make a pdf with video embedded in the document.
The document will be cross platform compatible and it will play inside the document, but the user (windows or mac) has to update to reader 9.
I created a pdf with video and tested in windows and mac and it works fine.
It is also possible to create what adobe calls a “legacy” pdf, which is backwards compatible with readers back to version6.
The only thing is that if you create a document with video that can be opened by these older versions, the video plays in Quicktime player.
If you decide to embed, the best format for embedding is flash.
Flash encoding can be a little tricky, I tried a few different settings in adobe media encoder and my conclusion is to go for a setting similar to what I deliver to web designers 400×225 15fps, Audio 96kbps total about 400kbps data rate.
The thing with compressing video into flash is that you want to make it as small as possible while it still looks and sounds good.
So the question is: how big can the pdf be with the video included?
Another decision is layout, how much space can the video take up on the page?
and
Do you want it to play in place or in a floating window?
The great thing about the floating window option is that you can have a little postage stamp picture of the video somewhere in the text and when they click, it opens in the native size on top of the text.
As another test I made a pdf with a H264 HD file embedded and that pdf went from 158k to 600MB (the size of the embedded video)
I don’t think that will be compatible with any pc’s other than the latest ones.
The performance is also very slow compared to the smaller flash encoded file.
So it’s really up to you, depending on how big your pdf already is, decide how much you want to add to the pdf with video.
Then divide by the number of video’s that you want to add and you’ll know what the target size is for each video in flash.
For a PDF with external quicktime files:
1. Encode your video H264 to be cross platform compatible.
2. The user on the windows end will have to have quicktime installed.
3. In acrobat pro, choose the “create legacy multimedia content” option.
4. Delete the “play media option” (or else the video will play in place at the small size)
5. Choose the “open up a file” option.
6. Select the quicktime. (make sure Quicktimes are in same folder as PDF)
