Powerpoint video problem (I know, yawn...)

[lowdrive]

Interesting new problem I'm having with video in powerpoint. In this
one presentation there is a large mix of avi and mpg files. They tend
to run just fine in a slide show..for a while..after going through
about 8 or 9 files, i occasionally get a jumbled green box over where
the video is, or I get the opening slide of the last video that played.


All of the videos work fine in windows media player.
All of the videos work fine if i just open the presentation and view a
particular slide.

So, i don't think its a problem with the format of the video (although
who knows) since powerpoint WILL play the video correctly. It just
seems to either get confused after playing several of them. Once the
problem occurs i have to use task manager to exit the program.

I see that PFCMedia has been recommended for the what I'm now terming
the green box of death or GBoD, but given that the files play
individually i'm wondering whether it has to do with something other
than the file format. I'm wondering whether it has to do with the fact
that the presentation itself is over 300megs and some of the videos are
that large as well.

I would appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Tech specs of the machine that's having this problem:
Alienware Sentia
Intel Pentium M 2.1GHz
2 GB RAM
windows XP Pro
Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller

 

[Troy @ TLC Creative]

I am thinking it has more to do with the system being able to handle the
large file size and large amount of video through your particular graphics
card. First troubleshoot by running on another system with the same spec's
or better that uses a video card with dedicated ram, preferably 128MB or
greater). The second step would be to optimize the presentation and
multimedia files so the computer can handle them better:
1. Are there entrance, motion or exit animations applied to the movie
windows? If so remove.
2. Can the file size be reduced by having the images optimized, add'l excel
chart info removed, etc.
- best solution for this is nxpowerlite (www.nxpowerlite.com) or
PPTools' Optimizer (www.rdpslides.com/pptools/optimizer/).
3. Can the video files be reduced in size and converted to standard codec's
- best solution for this is PFCMedia (www.pfcmedia.com)

 

[Austin Myers]

How were the video files inserted in the presentation? (as you remarked)
PFCMedia should be able to significantly reduce the size of the video files
and that may offer some relief.


Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com