Probably the most common problem I am faced with week in week out is video failing to play in a PowerPoint presentation. Here are a few of the checks to perform to get things working.

Firstly, PowerPoint does not physically bring the video file into your presentation as it does an image. Hit save after embedding and notice the PowerPoint file does not grow in memory size. Therefore the presentation always needs to know where the video is relative to the document. Always keep the video file in the same place as the PowerPoint file and get into the habit of moving the parent folder around as you move the presentation from computer to computer.

Secondly, there is a bug in PowerPoint, if you see the white square when you play the video there is a good chance this is caused by there being too many characters in the video file name, I did read somewhere that over 128 characters but I find this differs from machine to machine. If you ate one of those people who put your videos in a folder named movies or something then include this parent folder in this rule.

Lastly, I sometimes get problems when a presentation is built on a company network and again this differs from machine to machine. If the above doesn’t work try moving the presentation to your desktop or local folder and re embedding the video.

That should do it!

Also see Creating Video for Powerpoint and inserting video into Microsoft Powerpoint