From: Jason Miranda on
Hi,

I have a strange situation that I've seen addressed here:
http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/powerpoint_tip_putting_flash_in_powerpoint.html

I insert a Shockwave Flash Object in a PPT slide. I've used the manual
method as well as the Insert Flash method in Shyam's Toolbox. Each
inserts the Flash object correctly and all settings are correct. If I
go to the slideshow, the SWF plays fine the first time. However, if I
save the file and close it, then re-open, it will no longer play. I've
tried inserting the SWF in both PowerPoint XP and PowerPoint 2007, as
well as setting Embedding to both true and false — all the settings
I've tried have had the same result of not being able to play the
movie after the first viewing. After saving/closing the file, I re-
open and go to the slide with the SWF file. I look at the properties
and "Playing" is set to True. Then I go into slide show mode. The
movie will not play. I go back to the design view, check out the
properties of the SWF and "Playing" is now set to False.

However, this only happens with SWF that have a linked FLV file (all
the files are present in the same folder, SWF, PPT, and FLV). All my
SWF animations—all those single file SWFs—work fine, it's just those
with a link to the FLV that break after the first play. I could
convert these to WMV or some other format, but Flash has the benefit
of having the playback controls present on the slide as part of the
SWF, something that WMV doesn't offer.

I tried the VBA controls Ellen outlines in the link above, but with no
success. Also, I'm distributing this PPT widely, so I don't want to
have to resort to VBA b/c of the security issues. Has a fix been
found?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Jason
From: Jason Miranda on
Instead of going this route, I used a Windows Media Player object and
converted all the FLVs to WMVs. The playback controls for WMV are
exactly what I needed — I hadn't known about the ability to insert
that type of object before.