PowerPoint won't play linked SWF movie after 1st time

[Jason Miranda]

Hi,

I have a strange situation that I've seen addressed here:
http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/powerpoint_tip_putting_flash_in_powerpoint.html

I insert a Shockwave Flash Object in a PPT slide. I've used the manual
method as well as the Insert Flash method in Shyam's Toolbox. Each
inserts the Flash object correctly and all settings are correct. If I
go to the slideshow, the SWF plays fine the first time. However, if I
save the file and close it, then re-open, it will no longer play. I've
tried inserting the SWF in both PowerPoint XP and PowerPoint 2007, as
well as setting Embedding to both true and false — all the settings
I've tried have had the same result of not being able to play the
movie after the first viewing. After saving/closing the file, I re-
open and go to the slide with the SWF file. I look at the properties
and "Playing" is set to True. Then I go into slide show mode. The
movie will not play. I go back to the design view, check out the
properties of the SWF and "Playing" is now set to False.

However, this only happens with SWF that have a linked FLV file (all
the files are present in the same folder, SWF, PPT, and FLV). All my
SWF animations—all those single file SWFs—work fine, it's just those
with a link to the FLV that break after the first play. I could
convert these to WMV or some other format, but Flash has the benefit
of having the playback controls present on the slide as part of the
SWF, something that WMV doesn't offer.

I tried the VBA controls Ellen outlines in the link above, but with no
success. Also, I'm distributing this PPT widely, so I don't want to
have to resort to VBA b/c of the security issues. Has a fix been
found?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Jason

 

[Jason Miranda]

Instead of going this route, I used a Windows Media Player object and
converted all the FLVs to WMVs. The playback controls for WMV are
exactly what I needed — I hadn't known about the ability to insert
that type of object before.

 

[Lovasc]

I have exactly the same problem; when I insert the Shockwave flash object it plays great and all the functions work fine. But after I close the ppt and reopen in I can't get it to work anymore.

It makes no difference if I change the play setting to true. I have tried entering a new url, to a different valid SWF file and it still does not work. The only thing that is displayed is a grey background, the bar that is supposed to show the file loading progress and the text "loading settings: 0% /0kb".
I need to delete the object and insert a new object to get it to work again.

I have tried saving it as a PPS with no luck. I have tried embedding but that does not work. I have tried embedding and saving as Powerpoint '97-2003 file but some registry stetting is preventing that. I have tried to put in some visual basic code to set the 'play' property to true (which I found on the internet); nothing works.

Since I need to distribute this presentation I don't want to use any special plug-ins or modify system settings.

The Shockwave object is in fact a map with markers (It is from http://www.ammap.com/ ; great stuff) for our installs. It uses xml data and settings files and calls other SWF files. After I install it, it all works great, until I close the ppt and re-open it.

I am working on a Windows 7, 64 bit computer and using Powerpoint 2003 service pack 3. On my computer are installed Adobe Shockwave player 11.6, Adobe flash player 10 ActiveX and Adobe flash player 11 plugin 64-bit.

I sure hope someone can help me with this.

 

[noblesilence]

I had the same problem. I fixed it by modifying the swf file so that it reads the xml file and other files using absolute URL. I assume that all the files are in the same folder as swf, and swf has "Access local files only" permission. So by using the swf's absolute path, I can load other assets in the same path.

I found a way to read swf's own path on this blog post: (please google for "Having a swf load an XML file with same name learntodevelop", I am not allowed to post links.)