A list of questions concerning powerpoint output

[Conference_Tech]

Hi all.

I'm a conference technician for a company in the UK. The company runs a menagerie of different combinations of OS and PowerPoint, nowadays mostly Vista and 7 x32 and x64, with PP 2007 and 2010.



We have a lot of problems with people bringing powerpoints filled with videos (some presentations will have one or two, some will have forty or fifty, there have been a couple with more than a hundred embedded videos). I'm going to describe in a list the issues that we have, and then the fixes that we go through in order to correct these seemingly-random occurences.

Videos render a preview frame, but on play present a black screen (this is the major one)
Videos are set to loop and loop with ~1s of black screen between end and start
Videos are set to loop and do not loop on the first few clicks (think starting a manual petrol mower)
Videos play when a machine is not outputting on its second display, but then on connection to a projector either do not play at all (with a black placeholder, or a white placeholder), or play on the output only (the latter issue is less of a problem, just causes a few mini-heart attacks...!)

Videos which have been imported to a W7 x64 machine running PP 2007 are transferred to another machine also running W7 x64/PP2007, and then stop playing. This appears to happen even if both computers apparently have the correct codec (according to G-Spot).

Our most common fixes include:

Changing the extension of a video which doesn't play (say, from .wmv to .avi, or .mpg to .wmv, or .mpg to .wmv, there isn't any particular rhyme or reason to it). Just changing the extension of the video and re-importing it will usually make PowerPoint play it - Why?

Setting an external output to be the primary display device on a computer will occasionally fix videos which wouldn't otherwise play.

My question is, firstly, why the heck does changing the file extension determine whether powerpoint plays a video or not? The container and encoder are still the same, the ONLY thing that's different are three letters at the end of a filename.

Are we doing something wrong to be having such problems with PowerPoint according to the list above, or is it just a really buggy program?

Would love to get some expert advice on this.

[JohnWilson]

Sadly the answer isn't simple. Video has always been a problem in PowerPoint and still is (for different reasons in 2010)

So:

1. 2007 and 2010 insert video in totally different ways. In 2007 video is always linked and will not play if the link path is too long. (That's the probably unknown path the presenter used) Best practice would be to o=put the video and presentation in a single folder with a short path (say C:\PPTS\ and reinsert them. Not simple if there are hundreds. Sometimes just moving everything into one folder will work.

2010 embeds video by default and plays it using much newer software (Direct Show) Playing these back in 2007 is likely to give problems. If you do not have at least Service Pack 2 on PPT 2007 it will definitely fail. With the pack it is supposed to play but will not reproduce the effects you can add in 2010. Best practice is use 2010.

2. Embedded video in 2010

This is supposed to "just play" but doesn't always! The problem is that Direct Show can be programmed by third parties with little control and sometime the added code will conflict with attemps PPT makes to play the video (or sound file). The worst culprits are programs which come free with PCs" suspect DVD writers (not needed in Vista onwards) and Video editors / converters. Best practice is zap anything you don't really need.

3. You tube#

In 2010 the abiility to link to You Tube video was added. Obviously this need a web connection but also a recent update from Adobe has killed it. There's a page on our site here.

http://www.pptalchemy.co.uk/You_Tube...%27t_Play.html

4. Changing the extension.

This shouldn't work unless the user already changed it (possible in my experience) but I have also seen it work with the correct extension. I'm not sure why but I always suspect the original user has done something strange! I was running the Help Desk at The Presentation summit in the US when someone presented a PPt with Video that "Didn't play" Turned out he had made the video on a very old VHS camera, converted it to quicktime and then used a free converter to convert it to avi and then used the trim controls in 2010 to reedit and then ....

Short black screens are difficult to avoid. The faster the PC usually the less of a problem it is but the graphics card is working hard here!

some cards simply cannot cope with two video outputs (screen and projector) so setting the output to just projector often works. A better card is the real answer.

I know none of this is a definitive answer but it might help.

John (also in the UK)