Inserting QuickTime movies into PowerPoint presentations on Windows computers can be a frustrating experience. Because of different CODECS used to compress both audio and video tracks, sometimes a QuickTime movie that plays fine in QuickTime Player on a Windows or Macintosh computer will not play at all as an embedded movie file in PowerPoint for Windows.
One way to get around this is to convert the QuickTime movie file into AVI format. You can do this by upgrading the free QuickTime Player software for $30 to QuickTime Pro. Generally AVI formatted movies will play fine when they are embedded in PowerPoint XP (for Windows.) After QuickTime Pro is installed with the registration code you obtain after buying it, you can choose FILE – EXPORT and select AVI as the file format. It is also a good idea to make sure you are running the latest version of PowerPoint for your computer.
An alternative way to work around these issues is to insert an action button in PowerPoint to play a movie. You can choose the option “play program” in PowerPoint XP for the action, but select the QuickTime movie you want to play. This will link out of your PowerPoint presentation and launch the QuickTime Player application. You will have to resize and manually play the movie, but one advantage of this method is that it does not actually embed the QuickTime file in your PPT presentation file– so your file size does not balloon like it would with an embedded media file.
The article “The ins and outs of inserting objects into PowerPoint” by Jennifer Rotondo offers some additional helpful tips related to using PPT with other kinds of embedded media. The article “Cross Platform PowerPoint” by Geetesh Bajaj also is helpful on this topic.
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