Problem playing videos within PowerPoint 2000 presentations...

I have a problem with PowerPoint within Office 2000 on Windows 2000 SP4. If I try to run a video within a presentation, it just becomes a white box. This sometimes can be fixed on our build by upgrading to DirectX9 (we have version 7 on our build) and occasionally (on Evo laptops) we have to update the graphics drivers. However, I have an Evo D530 desktop which has the latest graphics drivers and DirectX9 and it still shows the white box. It's even the same after upgrading the PC to Media Player 9. It's a bit intermittent. One presentation was running from a network share - and failing. I copied it to a local drive and it ran correctly. I copied it back to the network share (overwriting the original) and it was still ok. However, I tried this with another presentation and it didn't work. The individual videos work ok within Media Player.

First thing to note is that Windows Media Player really only affects video
playback on Office 2000 in the area of codecs. In fact, we sometimes see
that people upgrade to WMP 9 and their videos stop working. This happens
when WMP has discontinued codecs because of security issues.

However, the true test is if the video plays in the MCI Media Player. If it
plays there, it should play in PPT. To test, go to Start/Run and type in
mplay32.exe Open the video in that MCI Media Player. Does it play or not?

Finally, note that the MCI Media Player has a problem with long paths. I
suspect that's the issue you're running into here, especially since you're
moving things around from the harddrive to the network. The network path is,
I assume, fairly long.

So to test, put both the presentation and the video on your C drive in a
folder called test. C:\Test. *THEN* reinsert your video into PPT. Does it
play?

Check out http://www.soniacoleman.com/Tutorial...multimedia.htm
for more detailed information about how PPT handles multimedia.

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com

"Jon Carp" wrote in message
news
I have a problem with PowerPoint within Office 2000 on Windows 2000 SP4.
If I try to run a video within a presentation, it just becomes a white box.
This sometimes can be fixed on our build by upgrading to DirectX9 (we have
version 7 on our build) and occasionally (on Evo laptops) we have to update
the graphics drivers. However, I have an Evo D530 desktop which has the
latest graphics drivers and DirectX9 and it still shows the white box. It's
even the same after upgrading the PC to Media Player 9. It's a bit
intermittent. One presentation was running from a network share - and
failing. I copied it to a local drive and it ran correctly. I copied it back
to the network share (overwriting the original) and it was still ok.
However, I tried this with another presentation and it didn't work. The
individual videos work ok within Media Player.

Thanks for the tip on path lengths. It seems reasonable as my customers use very convoluted path structures. However, as I mentioned, it's not a consistent fault. The same network path on a laptop (which had this problem before a DX9 and drivers update) now works on the network version. Also, the ONE presentation that copied locally and then copied back to exactly the same network location works from both locations. However, a dummy presentation (using one of the videos that works in the previous example) created on the local drive of the affected PC also doesn't work! All very odd!