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PPT2000: Cannot Play Movies from PowerPoint 98 Files

Article ID: 201308 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q201308

SYMPTOMS

When you open a PowerPoint 98 Macintosh Edition presentation that contains movie objects in PowerPoint 2000 for Windows, the movie objects will be missing. For example, you will see the following caption rather than the bitmap poster frame image:

QuickTime(tm) and a <Video> decompressor are needed to see this picture.

If you double-click this caption, you receive the following message:

The linked multimedia file is unavailable. Do you want to locate it yourself?

When you locate the original movie file, the movie may play; however, the bitmap poster frame will still contain the warning caption.

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CAUSE

This error is caused by fundamental differences in the two Operating System platforms. When you insert a movie file into your Macintosh PowerPoint presentation, the location of the movie file is represented by something similar to:

"HARD DRIVE:Movies:Quicktime:Movie_File"

The same movie file location within Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows would be similar to:

"C:\Movies\Quicktime\Movie_File.MOV"

In addition, the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows use two completely different methods for playing movie files. PowerPoint 98 communicates directly with the Quicktime extension on the Macintosh, a low-level system extension. When this information is translated for Microsoft Windows, PowerPoint 2000 attempts to communicate with a low-level extension, and is unable to do so.

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WORKAROUND

To work around this behavior, follow these steps:

Copy the original movie files to the computer where PowerPoint is installed.
Open the presentation in PowerPoint, and delete all movie objects.
Re-insert each movie object. You can insert movie objects in any of the following formats:
- QuickTime.
- MPEG.
- Audio Video Interleave(AVI).

All inserted movies will be linked to your presentation. If you show your presentation on a different computer, remember to also copy the movie file when you copy the presentation. If you do not, you will just have a picture of the poster frame of the movie.

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