Every time I insert a movie into a slide and save the presentation, the movie gets converted into a static image and does not play. I also get a box saying "Powerpoint is converting your presentation' - this never used to happen before

Are you saving in the old ppt format? Because this format doesn't support EMBEDDED movies they will be converted.

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Thanks. That seems to have been the problem. Not sure why because my preference settings was to save as pptx. But for some reason it was saving this particular file as an older version. Thanks