Problem playing .wmv file in PPT

[wayne0h]

Hi all, was hoping I could get some help here. I can't insert or play
a .wmv movie file in powerpoint or with the MCI media player.

I've scoured the various posts, checked mci extensions and mci32 items
in the registry according to the great site at:
http://www.soniacoleman.com/Tutorials/PowerPoint/multimedia.htm

but still cannot get mplay32.exe to play a .wmv file
(I get this error: 'a problem occurred initializing MCI').

Consequently this also means I can't insert the .wmv movie file into
PPT
(I get this error: 'Powerpoint couldn't insert a movie from the
selected file. Either the file is non-standard, or QuickTime is not
installed properly').

And if the .wmv file was already inserted (done on a machine without
this problem) into a different ppt file, and I try to play the video
from this ppt file on this machine, I get this error: 'the specified
file cannot be played on the specified MCI device. The file may be
corrupt, not in the correct format, or no fil'.

What else can I try? Several of our other machines have no problems
with these .wmv files, and the machines/setups are more or less the
same. I checked the video codecs and they seemed fine to me (although
I'm not altogether sure what to look for here), or at least its not
missing anything the other machines have. There are no other
video-type programs installed (e.g. QuickTime, etc.) as far as I can
tell. Don't know if it makes any difference, but there are 4 .wmv
files that I'm concerned with, 2 of them seem to be encoded in windows
media video v7, the other 2 in windows media video 9, but none of them
work for this machine.

Win2000 professional v. 5.0.2195, svcpk 3 build 2195,
dell optiplex gx150

any help greatly appreciated,

Wayne

 

[Sonia]

Do you have Windows Media Player V. 9 installed on the system? If not,
download and install it and see if that makes the difference.

 

[wayne0h]

Sonia:

thanks for the response. Yes, wmp 9 was already on that machine.
I've found now, that the 2 videos encoded in 9 do work now, because I
installed (in no particular order) the 6.4, the 7, and the 9vcm codec
packages currently available from the microsoft site. Since the other
2 videos (encoded in 7) did not work still, I did more searching,
found an old package at
http://download.microsoft.com/download/winmediatech40/install/8.0/win98me/en-us/wmpcdcs8.exe
, and installed that as well, to no avail.

At this point, I'm assuming I don't have or something's wrong with the
windows media video codec 7 on this machine. Correct me if I'm wrong,
but I'm guessing that the appropriate file for this version 7 codec
would be msvidc32.dll, which I have found in the c:\winnt\system32
folder and I've found its corresponding entry in the registry at
Hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows
nt\currentversion\drivers.desc

I've noticed that the other machines where everything works do not
have wmp version 9, but have either 6.4 (I think the default install
with Windows at the time) or have been upgraded to 7. For this
particular machine looks like it was upgraded from 6.4 to 9.

Any other ideas?

Sincerely,

Wayne

 

[Sonia]

No more ideas from me. <G> As you can imagine, multimedia in PowerPoint is
a very complex subject and success is dependent upon the file, the system,
the MCI settings, and the availability of the codec.

 

[wayne0h]

Sonia:

Thanks anyways. I'll probably end up suggesting a complete reinstall
of windows. Hopefully that should do it.

Wayne