Vista and playing video clips

[gbritnell]

I have XP Service pack 3 installed on my computer. I save some of the better video clips, commercials and .pps presentations. My friend just got a new lap top with Vista installed. I told him that I had some entertaining videos saved and would burn a DVD for him, which I did. I went over this morning and said "here's the disc, throw it in and I'll show you some of these videos". The first one I picked was a .pps presentation, some Celine Dione background music and some georgeous nature photography. The presentation started for a second and them Microsoft offered a pop up which said that unless Office was installed you might not get the full use of the videos. The pop up said to go to the desktop, click the icon for a key code for a 60 day free trial of Office and everthing would be hunky-dory. We did that and did a restart and now the .pps plays fine, the problem is some of the other video files have the colors all screwed up on them. They play the sound OK and you can make out the picture, it's just like the picture part of it is way oversaturated. That's the best way I can describe it. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
gbritnell

 

[Noitoen]

Try to open with OpenOffice it's free. They usually import ok.

 

[Mark-One]

On vista I usually forgo WMP entirely (latest version isn't *bad*, but I stopped liking media player after version 6), and use either the free version of Zoom Player, or VLC.

They might not have the proper video codecs on their machine. There are many different installers for these floating around, but I've long used the K-Lite Codec Pack - standard or full version, with a default install (or install for Playback Only, if the person doesn't encode videos - installing the least amount that you have to avoids potential problems/conflicts).

majorgeeks.com is a great site for freeware/shareware/etc.. and has all of the above.

I don't use powerpoint, but I seem to remember that you can export them in a format that will play on its own, without the need for powerpoint (just like in all of those dorky emails that I automatically delete since I'd seen them all 10 years ago anyway).

But Microsoft just loves promoting itself. I had a user who wanted to print out a publisher project across several pages, or something like that. Publisher 2003 would not do it, and the first thing in the help file was a recommendation to buy Publisher 2007, which does do this thing they were wanting.