PPT 2003 and Movies in Show Mode Won't Play

[Shrink]

Hi folks - I am trying to play a presentation that worked just fine a few
months ago in PPT 2003. Now, the movie that is embedded in the slide won't
play when show mode is running but it will play in edit mode. In show mode,
it actually causes powerpoint to hang and I must ctrl-alt-del to kill the
process. I have a sneaking suspicion that it is due to XP SP2 built 2162
because the movies played fine before. I have tried reinserting the video,
in addition to trying different avi's and wmv's in blank slides but to no
avail. Other than uninstalling SP2 (or doing a clean install of Windows)
does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

Steve

 

[Sonia]

If you are running the beta Service Pack 2 for Windows XP *and* the movie worked
fine before you installed SP2, have you posted your problem in one of the beta
newsgroups?
http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=xpsp2&slcid=us.

You say "the movies played fine before". Is that before you installed SP2?
Have you changed the location of the movie file? In PowerPoint 2003 there is a
limit of 128 characters in the path to a movie file. Is it possible that your
folder structure makes the full path longer than 128?

 

[Shrink]

Hi Sonia -I haven't posted there just in case this isn't related to SP2 - I
mistakenly mentioned that this wasn't a problem before but realized that I
hadn't actually run this presentation on this particular machine but another
machine so it may not be related to SP2. I narrowed the problem down a
little more. mpg files and divx files play just fine in Show mode, just not
wmv's (the ones I have are encoded in version 9). The location of the files
is well within the 128 character limit for directory name as well. The
files play just fine in any media player and even in Powerpoint, provided
that they are not viewed in show mode.

Steve

 

[Shrink]

.... forgot to mention as well - when I kill powerpoint after it hangs,
cleartype is no longer working and I need to reenable it in display settings
in XP.

Thanks for any other tips you might have!

Steve

 

[Sonia]

Does you other machine run the video in PowerPoint 2003 Slide Show mode?

 

[Sonia]

Does you other machine run the video in PowerPoint 2003 Slide Show mode? If so,
is it also a PowerPoint 2003/Windows XP system?

 

[Shrink]

Hi Sonia - unfortunately the other machine is running Windows 2000 SP3 and
an earlier version of Powerpoint. My desktop at home is running XP and
Powerpoint 2003 - i'll see how it runs there when I get home this evening.
I see a clean install of xp on the horizon - either that or convert the .wmv
files I need to play to mpg files and put off the inevitable reinstall for a
few weeks. Thanks!

Steve

 

[Sonia]

Not necessarily. If you aren't running Windows XP SP2 at home you'll have a
good test. My guess is that you'll have the same problem and find out that it
has nothing to do with Windows. Please let us know.

 

[Shrink]

The presentation with the embedded wmv files ran perfectly fine at home on
an XP SP2 desktop with PPT 2003. Poop :-(

I uninstalled and reinstalled office and had the same problem. Time for a
clean install of XP?

Thanks again, Sonia!

Steve

 

[Sonia]

Let me be certain that I understand. You have PowerPoint 2003 on both machines.
You have Windows XP SP2 on both machines. The WMV files run on one system and
not the other, right? It seems to me that it's time to consider what's
*different* on the systems, not try to re-install Windows and expect that to fix
the problem.

Do you have the same make and model video card on both systems? If not, have
you updated the video driver at work? Go to the manufacturer's website and look
for updated drivers. Do you have the same version of DirectX installed on both
systems? You can go to Start > Run and type dxdiag to determine the version of
DirectX. Try adjusting hardware acceleration downward. See the following:

How to set graphics hardware acceleration back
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00129.htm

Is there anything else you can tell us about differences between the systems?
I'm sure I haven't thought of all the things to check that might be different,
but hopefully others will pipe in with more ideas.

 

[Shrink]

Hi Sonia - it's all fixed now. I was going to turn down the hardware
acceleration if a clean install of XP didn't fix the problem. Luckily the
clean install did fix it I suspect that it was some conflict with
another codec installed on the system as part of the K-Lite Codec Pack.
I'll see after I install more codecs but that won't happen until after
Wednesday's presentation. LOL

Thanks again!

Steve