Video linking issue with PPT 2003

[Bears Fan]

My department upgraded from XP to 2003 a while ago. We have a lot of
powerpoint presentations we use and when my boss opens up an old Presentation
he created in Office XP, none of the video files work and he gets an error
message saying that the link for the video cannot be found. It also doesn't
tell him what the original name of the file is. Do we need a plug in or is
there something we need to select in the options so all the videos will work
without having to re-link them?

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[Austin Myers]

The issue is that 2003 introduced a bug/feature where the path/filename to a
media file can NOT be longer than 128 charaters. Try moving the
presentations and related files to a folder on the root drive. (I.E.
C:\test) I think that may sort it for you.

Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com

 

[Bears Fan]

Well, a lot of the file names are short (way under 128 characters) are only
directed to our shared folder on the network (as the presentations sit in
there). Could there be any other issue too possibly?

Thanks for the first response, I will look into that.

 

[Austin Myers]

Ah, didn't realise a network was involved. Opening/playing a presentation
across a network is problematic at best and I strongly recommend copying it
to the local drive and running it from there.

If you feel up simply must run them across the LAN you are going to have to
work closely with your IT folks to review the servers error logs to
determine where the failure is occuring.

Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

PowerPoint Video and PowerPoint Sound Solutions www.pfcmedia.com