Powerpoint Video Locking.

[Wadoki]

I use a computer to display 24/7 PowerPoint presentations running in a loop that displays on our companies break room TV’s. As you can imagine quality and safety training over and over is boring so I like to break it up with cartoons and TV shows that I record and convert (as well as download). My problem is that some of the videos lock up during playback. The audio and video stop, but after the normal time for the clip to end it ends and goes to the next slide. I am running Windows XP SP1 and Office XP

My question is: Are there any knows issues with large video’s, codec’s, what ever that I can solve to fix this problem

 

[Dreamboat]

How clean is the PC, Wadoki?
Did you try running on any other PCs?
How big is the entire presentation? Anne Troy

http://www.TheOfficeExperts.com

 

[Wadoki]

Actually it's very clean. I purchased this system just for this purpose. It is a Duel Xeon Unit with 1 gig of memory and a 128meg video card. I purchased it with Office preloaded from Dell. The only thing I did to it was add the computer to the Domain and load DivX 5.03 codec, Nemo codec and Xvid codec. The PPP files are 12 to 14 meg and better.

I did have a lesser PC in it’s place and I had the same results. That is why I bought the new one, but I get the same results.

One other observation is that the video files seem to have been corrupted because they tested OK, then after they run in PP and do the locking they lock at the same spot even played outside of PP.

 

[Dreamboat]

Wow.
Sorry, I can't help further. Anne Troy

http://www.TheOfficeExperts.com

 

[onedtent]

try turning down the video acceleration or update the video driver

 

[safaritek]

a. Xvid is not a very stable codec ... I realize you want to get a small footprint for the videos, but you should stick with something that is traditionally supported. My suggestion would be to get the RealVideo add-in for powerpoint and convert videos to realvideo (they have a free converter, or most editing software can export to RV too). You could also get Microsoft's coder and convert them to ASF, which is natively supported by WMP. If you use the '8' or '9' codecs the footprint is extremely small.

b. The majority of software, unless specifically designed for it, will not take both processors into consideration. I do not believe powerpoint uses both processors, so you are really running it on one.

c. Memory leaks occur in almost every software made ... after a while it would be natural for things to go a bit awry and need a reboot. We ran a kiosk at the airport with similar issues, we fixed most of them by setting the computer to automatically reboot and log in when the power was interrupted. Then we put on a standard outlet timer and had it shut off power at 3 am every morning - back on at 4 am. This gave the system time to cool off and to refresh memory levels. It ran for 3 years this way.

Hopefully some of these ideas will help.

If you really want a stable kiosk-type application though (at least stabler than PPT) you may want to consider doing the kiosk using Director, possiblky even flash, but I prefer Director.

 

[Wadoki]

safaritek That was a lot of good info. It will take a few days of testing to see if what I have changed will work.