MPEG slide shows black box only - Help

[InOverMyHead]

I made the .ppt file on my desktop. (Lots of short MPEG clips, one per
slide) It worked fine there. Then I copied it to my laptop (same drive -
same folder - same filenames). It opens and shows thumbnails. When I try to
run slide show it pops up the thumbnail, then goes to black box. I can
advance to the next slide but same problem. Click-on-slide and mouse-over
don't help. (Slides are set to begin running movie clip immediately.) I can
run clips with Windows Media Player fine. Help!

And - when I make up a new presentation on the laptop and insert movie from
file etc etc they come in as black boxes, with no thumbnails whatsoever. So
its not a file location problem.

Details: I have a new Dell Inspiron 6000 (512MB Ram) running WinXPPro and
Office XP - all updated. Slide show setup is set to not use hardware
acceleration. (I do not have a duel head video adaptor, although I presume
it mirrors to the external video output.)

I have read http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00467.htm but it doesn't
apply since I'm getting black box on primary (only) monitor, not a secondary
monitor.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Bob

 

[Austin Myers]

Put it all in C:\Test and see if it doesn't cure the problem.

Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com

 

[InOverMyHead]

Okay - all dumped into folder c:\test. Just like before (old ppt shows
thumbnails then black box; newly created ppt in that folder, using mpeg
files in that folder don't even show a thumbnail.)

But here's something new - when I insert an avi file into a slide, it works
fine. Is there some MPEG codec I need? - for PowerPoint? Because - they
play fine directly from WMPlayer, but don't from PowerPoint.

Again, any help will be greatly appreciated.

Bob
PS: (Actually I'm using PowerPoint 2003 on the laptop.)

 

[Austin Myers]

Two solutions:

1. Make the machine fit the video.

This means figuring out the actual codec being used, (I recommend using
GSpot, do a Google for it) downloading and then installing it properly.


2. Make the video be more Windows standard.

You can use Windows Media Encoder (or other video editing software) to
manually convert it, or use our add in at www.PFCMedia.com to do the entire
thing automatically. It's designed to process multimedia specifically for
use in PowerPoint.

The advantage of method two is that the resulting presentation will play on
just about any Windows machine around.



Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com

 

[InOverMyHead]

GSpot reports "Codec(s) are NOT installed"
Codec: MPEG@_Video
Name: MPEG-2

But it doesn't say how to get it. So I googled and . . . installed Elecard
MPEG-2 codec.
GSpot still says . . . not installed.
I guess I could keep googling around for mpeg2 codecs, but is this what I
should be doing? Maybe I should be looking at Windows Media Encoder? Okay,
I'll go git it.

Bob

 

[InOverMyHead]

Okay, now I have Windows Media Encoder. It seems to want to convert to a
Windows Media Player format (wmv) which is not what I wanted - but hey - it
works! So now I have to start converting all 27 MPEG clips to wmv files - I
guess.

But can anyone answer - why can WMP play my MPEG's fine but PowerPoint is
lacking a Codec? Why is it so hard to get PowerPoint to recognize a MPEG
file - with a new machine all clean installs and complete updates ??

(or maybe - would it be easier to upgrade to WMPlayer 10? Probably not,
since its not WMP that's balking.)

Okay - back to converting everything to wmv files. This will get me through
this deadline, but I sure hope I can find a better fix before the next one!

Any more ideas will be greatly appreciated!

Bob

 

[Austin Myers]

The issue is that while you have an mpeg-2 decoder, it isn't fully
compatible with the MCI player (used by PowerPoint). Here is a tool you may
use to test for full compatibility.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...ac-0ab6-4990-943d-627e6ade9fcb&displaylang=en

A note about the Windows Media Encoder. You'll need to build a profile for
it that doesn't bloat the file size to drastically. The standard profiles
that ship with the encoder tend to create large files.


Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com