Saturday, July 24, 2010
NVidia Not Microsoft (This Time!)
I was tortured today by a movie that I was trying to include in a PowerPoint 2007 presentation. This particular movie had a white background and looked just fine in the Windows Media Player. And it looked just fine when first inserted into PowerPoint 2007, but when clicked, it turned into a black rectangle. So, as one does, I Googled. I found that Microsoft, with all its extraordinary resources, does not know how to handle movie file names over 128 characters. So, I fiddled around with my directory structure, and suddenly I could actually see the movie. Better - but still tediously broken as the white background suddenly became grey when the movie was clicked.
How frustrating. There are various solutions on the Web. I upgraded the Windows Media Player - that did nothing. I switched to using a VLC embedded active X control. That crashed PowerPoint and I lost some edits. Pretty typical mileage for those of us that have to suffer Microsoft's programming excellence. The visual effect was so bad, that I decided to try harder. I investigated changing the gamma and contrast of the movie. Very tedious - but no success. Then I decided to investigate my graphics card settings. I switched off hardware acceleration entirely - and the problem was gone. Now that is an easy solution - just turn off hardware acceleration before giving the presentation - I should be able to manage that.
I am annoyed that I wasted so much time finding this small tweak - and hope that if you have the problem "white becomes gray" with an inserted video in a PowerPoint presentation - you'll try this solution early.
I still hate PowerPoint 2007 - but on this occasion I must admit that most of the fault seems to lie with NVidia and their irritating attempts to improve the performance of their cheap graphics chipset in my Dell Latitude 830. (And yes, before you ask, I have upgraded the driver).
Mind you - it would be good if Microsoft hadn't made PowerPoint 2007 completely awful with their silly ribbon bar fiasco, and wouldn't it be great if instead of messing up the interface, they had made it possible to use a file path of over 128 characters? But if you have the "white becomes gray" problem - just trying switching off hardware acceleration before you try anything else.
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How frustrating. There are various solutions on the Web. I upgraded the Windows Media Player - that did nothing. I switched to using a VLC embedded active X control. That crashed PowerPoint and I lost some edits. Pretty typical mileage for those of us that have to suffer Microsoft's programming excellence. The visual effect was so bad, that I decided to try harder. I investigated changing the gamma and contrast of the movie. Very tedious - but no success. Then I decided to investigate my graphics card settings. I switched off hardware acceleration entirely - and the problem was gone. Now that is an easy solution - just turn off hardware acceleration before giving the presentation - I should be able to manage that.
I am annoyed that I wasted so much time finding this small tweak - and hope that if you have the problem "white becomes gray" with an inserted video in a PowerPoint presentation - you'll try this solution early.
I still hate PowerPoint 2007 - but on this occasion I must admit that most of the fault seems to lie with NVidia and their irritating attempts to improve the performance of their cheap graphics chipset in my Dell Latitude 830. (And yes, before you ask, I have upgraded the driver).
Mind you - it would be good if Microsoft hadn't made PowerPoint 2007 completely awful with their silly ribbon bar fiasco, and wouldn't it be great if instead of messing up the interface, they had made it possible to use a file path of over 128 characters? But if you have the "white becomes gray" problem - just trying switching off hardware acceleration before you try anything else.
