My wife is producing a Powerpoint slide show for a friend’s wedding reception. Everything is working great except for one slide which is a short video clip.
When we insert the movie into the slide, the video plays, but there is no sound. The sound works for the rest of the slide show, which is basically a compilation of slides with music in the background.
The video is an mpg file, but I have also converted it to wmv and avi with similar results.
On the movie tools we have clicked on the “Sound volume” icon and moved the volume all the way up, but to no avail.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
ETA: Windows 7, Powerpoint 2007
I’m 90% sure PowerPoint can only play one sound at a time. I know I’ve seen random sound effects kill background music.
You need to insert the video as a Windows Media Player object, which will bypass this restriction for reasons that I don’t particularly understand.
Doing that is kind of complicated:
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Click on the orb in the top left and then “PowerPoint Options”
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Select “Customerize” from the list on the left of the new window
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From the top drop box, select “Developer Tab”
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From the list of commands, like “More Controls” and then click the add button and then OK.
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In the top left you should see the new More Controls button. Click on it.
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Select Windows Media Player from the list and insert it where you want it in your slideshow.
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Right-click on the WMP display and select Properties.
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In the new properties window, set the URL field to the address of the movie you want to play.
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Huzzah.
Thanks, Palooka. That seems to work, sort of. It works on my XP machine, but not on my wife’s Windows 7 box. That’s not insurmountable, because we can use my machine for the reception instead of my wife’s, but I’d like to get it working on hers also.
The thing that puzzles me from your response is that there are no other sound effects at the point we’re inserting the video. The video clip is on slide # 2. Slide 1 is a title with no sound effects, and the music doesn’t start until slide 3.
Ideally I would like to get this to work as a regular video clip instead of having to mess with WMP.
For further clarification, I can edit the Powerpoint on my machine, where it runs fine, save it to a flash drive and then try to run if from the flash drive on her machine. Video but no sound. I made the same modifications on her Powerpoint as on mine, to add the extra controls, etc.
It probably isn’t playing on the Win7 box because the video file is under a different URL. Using a relative URL would solve that problem. For example, if the PowerPoint file and video file are in the same directory, point the URL to .\movie.avi
Oh, and the video file needs to travel with the PowerPoint presentation. It doesn’t embed it.
My semi-guess is Window’s Media Control Interface (which is what PowerPoint uses) doesn’t support the audio codec used in the video, which is probably mp3. If that’s the case, running it through WMP is your only simple option.