Powerpoint "Kiosk" not playing entire movie

[Guest]

Hello all,
I've tried searching for this problem but cannot find a solution, I hope
someone here can help.

Background:
I built a running kiosk using PowerPoint that plays movies that the customer
wants to see. It's built with navigation buttons on the left, as the customer
selects a video it plays in the main screen area (another slide with movie
autostart). The problem is that when the kiosk is ran, the visitor can play
and watch movies in thier entire length until about the 3rd time. Upon
viewing a movie for the 3rd time the movie wants to stop playing at about the
5 minute mark and stops like it is complete and moves to the next screen.
This happens on 2 of the 6 movies in this presentation.

Problem:
What is causing some of the movies to fail after 5 minutes of the 3rd viewing?

Specs: Win XP Pro (5.1.2 SP1), PowerPoint SP1 (11.6361), Media Player 10
(10.00.00.3646).
Movies are Quicktime MOV files, the XP machine was "hacked" with mods to the
registry to allow playing of them with Windows Media Player. Movie sizes that
fail are 1.7G and 1.8G. One other movie at 1.7 G works fine, the others are
1.2 and below.

Thanks in advance for any assistance,
Mike

 

[Austin Myers]

Movies are Quicktime MOV files, the XP machine was "hacked" with mods to
the

registry to allow playing of them with Windows Media Player.

There is the problem... Convert the files to a standard Windows format.
(WMV)

Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com

 

[Guest]

Hi,
How can that be the problem? Can you explain what is happening? Windows is
fussy sometimes and I don't understand why a simple reg change would create a
problem like this. The reg change was done to allow them to play in MP. They
play in thier entirety by themselves in Media Player, and they play fine when
embedded in a PPT file unless they play more than 3 times. Is there a buffer
problem? Where? Something else?

We are using MOV files due to the quality, they look better as MOV than with
other formats we've seen. The files are being played on a 42 inch flat panel
display.

Thanks for any insight you can give me

 

[Austin Myers]

Hacking the registry like this can have (as you have seen) all sorts of
weird results and tracking it down can be a real nightmare. As to the
buffer issue, yes that might be part of it. Every time you fire WMP inside
of PPT it allocates memory that does NOT get released until you close that
instance of PPT. (Note: This is true of all forms within PPT.)

Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com