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Unlocking Secured PDF
Jan 17 2009
If you want to play high-quality videos in your powerpoint slides, this is a must-read to avoid embarrassing black box during your
presentation.
How does Powerpoint play videos?
Powerpoint doesnt uses windows media player for video playback by default. Instead, It uses Media Control Interface (MCI). That
means even if your videos play fine on windows media player, it has nothing to do with whether they will render fine in your presentation.
Take-away message: So you should always test your videos on MCI first!
Microsoft has an article explaining the How in details here.
How to test videos on MCI?
You may test your machine set up by manually starting the MCI player and playing the media file. To do so, for Windows XP, click Start
> Run and type mplayer2.exe in the command line box and click OK. This will start the MCI player (Not the Windows Media
Player) used by PowerPoint. You may then open your media file in the normal manner and play it. If the media fails to play in the MCI
player it will not play properly in PowerPoint. (Note, Microsoft removed the MCI executable from Windows Vista, however the
functionality is the same in PowerPoint.)
Crap, my files dont play on MCI, now what?
Solution 1: Convert videos to .wmv and disable Hardware Acceleration!
Convert all your videos to the powerpoint-friendlier windows media format(.wmv). To do so, you may download Windows Media
Encoder, which is a great tool that does the convertion for free.
However, .wmv isnt the entire magic solution. When your videos are encoded at a high bit-rate for quality purpose, MCI might fail to
render properly. This is partly due to the DirectX technology MCI uses. To work around, you need to disable or turn down Hardware
Acceleration.
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Once converted, there is no need to disable hardware acceleration, and the .mpg videos should play properly in MCI.
I personally recommend Solution 2, as no performance needs to be sacrificed, although you need to have QuickTimePro.
Solution 3: Bypass MCI & just Embed Windows Media Player
If the aforementioned MCI trick doesnt work for you, there is another route: bypass MCI and just embed Windows Media Player in a
PowerPoint slide full-screen. Here are the detailed steps:
1. Go to the slide where you want your video to appear.
2. You will need the control toolbox to be displayed. Click View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox, click on the last icon which should
be More Controls. (For PowerPoint 2007, Click Developer tab. Under Controls, click on the icon More Controls.)
3. Scroll to the bottom and click Windows Media Player. Cursor changes to crosshairs.
4. Start at the top left corner and draw a box that covers the entire slide. Right click in the middle of your slide and select Properties.
This will bring up the properties dialog box.
5. Double-click fullscreen so it is set to True. In the URL setting, enter the filename of your video (include the path if its in a different
directory).
6. Close the dialog box and you are done.
If you have many videos to show in your slides, this solution could become tedious as you have to embed the windows media player for
every slides you wanna play video on.
To this end, I would really hope Microsoft to step up and solve this. MCI issue has been there for over 10 years, and the success of
PowerPoint urges MS to really perfect it.
If the solutions dont work for you, feel free to comment/email me.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 3:21 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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About Me
Colin Zheng
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2)click properties
3)press settings tab
4)press advanced
5)press troubleshoot tab and disable the acceleration by dragging the pointer towards none
Peter says: November 17th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Well neither of these worked and I have had this problem many times before. Simplest thing to do if you dont mind having to click
once the slide is up is:
insert your movie, just for a backdrop..
create a text box with the name of the video.
Right click the text box name and choose hyperlink
then just link to the file you want. It will play anything that windows media player can play.
this sounds silly but it works,
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Colin Zheng
recently finished
his Ph.D in
Computer
Science from University
of Washington.
His research involves
tackling how humans
could better perceive and
interact with the world
through light.
He has pursued a
Technology
Entrepreneurship
Certificate from Business
School of U.W, as he has
always been interested in
bringing research to the
next level.
Thank you very much for help. In Microsoft help page they just mentioned set down drive accelerator, but not mentioned how to
do itthanks a lot.
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I cant say how much I thank you for resolving my problems. I am now able to play the Movie Maker files using either embedding
Windows Media Player within the developer control or simply insert an .avi file. thank you, thank you
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Technology
Hi Colin, nearly 3 years on since you posted this article and its still providing help. Its 12:11am and Im helping my Son with a PP
presentation and the clip would only show up as a black box. Thank you very much. I can now go to bed.
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hours trying different solutions, updating shit and installing SP3 etc. ad nauseum, nothing worked including changing file extension.
I followed your solution 3 and it works! )) I now have to ensure it will also play on other laptops as this is a major training
presentation which will need to be distributed to other people including the trainer.
thanks again, much appreciate your helpbtw has this even been fixed by microsoft after all these years? it must be my computer
idk.
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