AVI videos do not play in Powerpoint unless renamed to WMV?

[Tuomas Rissanen]

Does anyone have a solution to the following problem: .AVI videos (eg.
MPEG4v3 or WMV9 codecs) do not play (only a black box appears) in Powerpoint
unless the extension is renamed to .WMV or .MPG. The videos are in the same
folder as the presentation on the desktop. I am aware of the "white box"
problem which is solved by reducing the length of the path. The .AVI videos
show fine in Media Player without any renaming. I have downloaded Windows
Media Video 9 codecs including MPEG4v3. I have Win Vista Home Pro and MS
Office 2007 Professional. Is this a bug in Powerpoint 2007? Otherwise
renaming would not be a problem but I have hundreds of old video files whose
extension is .AVI (MPEG4v3) which I need all the time in Powerpoint
presentations. I did not have this problem earlier with Win XP Pro and MS
Office 2003 where things worked well after downloading the MPEG-4v3 codec.
Thank you in advance!

 

[CyberTaz]

You'd probably do better posting this in the Windows PPt group rather than
this one - it's the Mac PPt group.

 

[buddyddog]

I have the same problem. Both powerpoint 2003 and powerpoint 2007 AVI files
won't play in windows vista unless extension is changed from AVI to MPG.
These same AVI files play in VISTA Windows Media Player. Powerpoint 2003 and
2007 AVI files play correctly in Windows XP. It looks to me as though the
problem lies with Powerpoint interaction with VISTA. I have emailed
Microsoft and it appears that they are unable or unwilling to resolve the
problem. Since I have too many presentations to correct by changing the file
extension, I decided to go back to Windows XP operating system where
Powerpoint 2007 works just fine.

 

[Fausto]

Is a common problem, I have the same (with powerpoint 2003 or 2007 and
Vista), Microsofot do not fix it. The solution is to move back to Powerpoint
2002 (keeping Vista) or to reduce the hardware acceleration of the video
(this worked on my desktop). Unfortunately in my new Toshiba Satellite
U200-126 (with Vista) the video driver do not allows to reduce the graphic
acceleration of chipset intel 945GM Express so I moved back to Powerpoint
2002. In Internet a lot of people have this problem.