LEK said:
First of all, I'd like to thank the members of this community for their
extremely helpful posts. I was unable to play avi movies in PowerPoint 2003,
they would show up black. After reading relevant posts, I reduced the
graphics hardware acceleration to the mid-level, disabling DirectDraw and
Direct3D, which worked. Being very happy about that, I'm still wondering:
Thanks for letting us know that you got your ultimate problem with the video
playing resolved, Louis. That's great to hear!
1) Why does this fix it? ie.: what is the nature of the underlying problem?
I even did not have "use hardware acceleration" checked in PowerPoint.
I don't know exactly why changing hardware acceleration resolves so many
video problems, but basically what's happening is that you're turning some
of/most of/all of (depending on the settings you choose) the display
functionality back over to Windows to handle instead of relying on the video
card or the video card driver (or whatever!) itself. Even if you don't have
"use hardware acceleration" checked in PPT, it still may be in effect
because of the settings you've specified in your Windows display settings.
Although some games and other programs can take advantage of the increased
graphics capability hardware acceleration, direct draw and direct 3D can
offer, other programs don't particularly like those options and often seem
to actually conflict with them. PPT usually seems to be in that latter
category.
2) What could have caused this to start happening? Windows Media Player and
DirectX are up-to-date. Should I be looking for the answer to this problem in
another forum?
Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it or waste my time trying to chase it
down. I don't know what would cause something like this to just start
happening out of the blue, but it's possible that you downloaded some
software or something that updated a DLL file or another on your system, and
that's what's causing the issues.
I can tell you that weird display issues have been around since at least
Windows 95/Office 95 days, though, and changing Hardware Acceleration (often
coupled with a change in color depth settings) fixed them even then!
I remember getting this new Gateway system in early 1997 that was way
high-end for the time, but the stupid display gave me absolute fits! PPT
used to lock the system about half the time, and the other half of the time,
I'd get funky streaky images and all kinds of weird things. I had to find
the specific combination of hardware acceleration and color depth and
display size that allowed me to actually work in peace. Man, oh, man, that
drove me crazy until I got it figured out! (I just found posts from 1999 and
2001 where I was talking about troubleshooting that very same display issue
on that very same system, LOL! And here it is 2005 and things still aren't
any better. Figures!)
The upshot is, if it works now, I'd just move on.
