You receive a "QuickTime and a Video decompressor are needed to see this picture" error message when you try to play a movie in a slide view in PowerPoint

When you double-click a movie in slide view, you may see the following caption rather than a bitmap: When you double-click this caption, no error message appears, and nothing happens.

When you insert a movie on a slide, Microsoft PowerPoint actually creates a link to the original movie file.

The problem occurs for one or both of the following reasons:

• You copied the presentation to another computer but you did not copy the movie files. Or you copied all the files, but PowerPoint cannot find the movie files.
  
  
• The type of link required to play the movie is not supported by PowerPoint or the operating system. For example, PowerPoint for the Macintosh cannot activate Windows Media Player objects.

To resolve this problem, follow these steps:

1. When you copy your presentation between a Macintosh-based computer and a Windows-based computer, make sure that you copy all the movie files.
2. Make sure that your movie files can be played on the destination computer.
3. Open the presentation on the destination computer.
4. For each movie object, do the following:
   1. Delete the movie.
   2. Re-insert the movie.
5. Save the presentation.

NOTE: Windows-based programs can play only QuickTime movies that are saved without dependencies (also called "flattened" QuickTime movies).

It is possible to convert .avi movies to QuickTime movies and to convert QuickTime movies to .avi movies. Several third-party utilities are available that can do this.