PowerPoint MPG playback issue

[Steve Gould]

Hello,

I have run into an issue with PowerPoint in Office 2000 on Windows XP (and
98, but I haven't tried other OS's). If you embed a .mpg clip and then run
it in a second monitor or projector while it is also on the laptop or PC
screen then the cloned screen (both at the same time) will not show the
video clip. I have reproduced this issue on several laptops running XP from
different manufacturers, different monitors, projectors, etc. We had a
similar issue with Win98, but it caused distortion of the clips. It was
fixable in system.ini by modifying the MCI section to use only a certain
driver.

PowerPoint uses Media Player (mplay32.exe), note I didn't say Windows Media
Player, to play video clips. Yes the same one used since Windows 3.1. XP
mplay32 uses "DirectShow" for MPEG playback. Where can I find a location to
switch it over to use option "Video for Windows" instead (like in the Win98
system.ini). That is in effect what I did with Windows 98.


--
Steve Gould
Network Administrator
APA - The Engineered Wood Association
253-620-7454
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Steve Gould]

The problem is sort of fixed. The answer was to disable DirectDraw
acceleration (using dxdiag). I think this means I have a conflict between my
video drivers (several different 3D video cards such as Geforce4 and Radeon)
and DirectX 9. The downside is that it hurts 3D acceleration, but since
these are business machines I don't mind so much. My users might not agree,
but waaaa!

Steve Gould