WMV movie resizing

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gary
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G

Gary

I have a client playing wmv movies through PowerPoint 2000 on Windows
2000 on a fast new laptop. The movies are compressed to 352x240 pixels
and we have stretched these so they fill the screen. The client has
played many times and all is OK (well there was another problem with
sound but a windows media upgrade to 9 solved that) - but a couple of
times he has said that the movie plays in the bottom left quarter of
the screen rather than full-screen. When he restarts the computer and
tries again all is well.

Anyone got any ideas what could be causing this. I've never seen
PowerPoint re-size movies like this. I have a lot of experience with
mpegs and avis and not much with wmvs. Could it be there is a
performance hiccup and the wmv automatically resizes to maintain
playback or something???

Any ideas would be much appreciated, or even if you have no solution
but have seen this happen also.

Many Thanks

Gary
 
Hi Gary,

My best guess is a resource or performance issue since the
reboot resolves it. You might try checking for upgrades
for the drivers for his "fast, new laptop".

You could also chek to see what's loaded on the PC before
he starts the presentation.

HTH,
Glenna
 
I had a similar problem -- well, two of them, actually -- last month. In
one case, my WMV file played full screen on the projector no matter
what. I never did resolve that one at the time, although in retrospect,
I can't remember for sure if I toggled the display so that it only
showed on the large screen and not on the laptop as well. (I'm 99% sure
I did do that, but...) That would be worth a shot in your case.

The one I did resolve, well, it took some mucking around (with an
audience of 200 watching, mind you), but I think that what resolved it
was resetting the laptop display so that it matched that of the
projector. (Our projector was at 1024x768, but the desktop reset itself
when we rebooted it or something and it was at a different display
setting.) In that case, the video was squashed up in the top half of the
slide, but it straightened itself out once we got the same resolution on
both laptop and projector.

Both are worth trying here.
 
Thanks for your reply Glenna. Yeah it would seem like resources
getting low as it has only happened a couple of times, not every time.
The computer is a 1.7Ghz Pentium with 512Mb of Ram set-up purely to
run this show, so it's hard to know what they might have done to eat
up resources - but it's certainly possible. They may well have been
launching PPT repeatedly which might have done it?
I guess my follow on would be why should a performance hit cause the
movie to shrink? Usually you would expect playback to stutter, or
sound to breakup or something - not for the movie to automatically
decide to play smaller on the page. Any other thoughts on this would
be appreciated. Thanks for your time

Gary
 
Thanks for your reply Echo. I hadn't considered it being a projector
issue so I will check whether they were using one when it happened.
Having said that if it was a resolution mis-match then I would have
expected it to be bad every time until they fixed it. This played fine
several times and then had the problem "randomly" occur. I'll find out
if the projector was involved though.

Thanks for your thoughts

Gary


Echo S said:
I had a similar problem -- well, two of them, actually -- last month. In
one case, my WMV file played full screen on the projector no matter
what. I never did resolve that one at the time, although in retrospect,
I can't remember for sure if I toggled the display so that it only
showed on the large screen and not on the laptop as well. (I'm 99% sure
I did do that, but...) That would be worth a shot in your case.

The one I did resolve, well, it took some mucking around (with an
audience of 200 watching, mind you), but I think that what resolved it
was resetting the laptop display so that it matched that of the
projector. (Our projector was at 1024x768, but the desktop reset itself
when we rebooted it or something and it was at a different display
setting.) In that case, the video was squashed up in the top half of the
slide, but it straightened itself out once we got the same resolution on
both laptop and projector.

Both are worth trying here.

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com
I have a client playing wmv movies through PowerPoint 2000 on Windows
2000 on a fast new laptop. The movies are compressed to 352x240 pixels
and we have stretched these so they fill the screen. The client has
played many times and all is OK (well there was another problem with
sound but a windows media upgrade to 9 solved that) - but a couple of
times he has said that the movie plays in the bottom left quarter of
the screen rather than full-screen. When he restarts the computer and
tries again all is well.

Anyone got any ideas what could be causing this. I've never seen
PowerPoint re-size movies like this. I have a lot of experience with
mpegs and avis and not much with wmvs. Could it be there is a
performance hiccup and the wmv automatically resizes to maintain
playback or something???

Any ideas would be much appreciated, or even if you have no solution
but have seen this happen also.

Many Thanks

Gary
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, I hear you, Gary.

During the thing with all the people watching, the tech crew had tested
the presentation with all the videos and the projector -- the whole
works -- earlier that afternoon. Somehow the computer got rebooted, and
when they called up the presentation to do the show, the video was all
screwy. So it was a *bit* random, I guess you could say.

Wonder if there's a cabling issue? Maybe try tightening the projector
connector (assuming there's a projector involved) when it's connected to
the laptop. I know I've been lazy and not done that before, and it's not
pretty. :-)

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com
Thanks for your reply Echo. I hadn't considered it being a projector
issue so I will check whether they were using one when it happened.
Having said that if it was a resolution mis-match then I would have
expected it to be bad every time until they fixed it. This played fine
several times and then had the problem "randomly" occur. I'll find out
if the projector was involved though.

Thanks for your thoughts

Gary

Echo S said:
I had a similar problem -- well, two of them, actually -- last month. In
one case, my WMV file played full screen on the projector no matter
what. I never did resolve that one at the time, although in retrospect,
I can't remember for sure if I toggled the display so that it only
showed on the large screen and not on the laptop as well. (I'm 99% sure
I did do that, but...) That would be worth a shot in your case.

The one I did resolve, well, it took some mucking around (with an
audience of 200 watching, mind you), but I think that what resolved it
was resetting the laptop display so that it matched that of the
projector. (Our projector was at 1024x768, but the desktop reset itself
when we rebooted it or something and it was at a different display
setting.) In that case, the video was squashed up in the top half of the
slide, but it straightened itself out once we got the same resolution on
both laptop and projector.

Both are worth trying here.

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com
I have a client playing wmv movies through PowerPoint 2000 on Windows
2000 on a fast new laptop. The movies are compressed to 352x240 pixels
and we have stretched these so they fill the screen. The client has
played many times and all is OK (well there was another problem with
sound but a windows media upgrade to 9 solved that) - but a couple of
times he has said that the movie plays in the bottom left quarter of
the screen rather than full-screen. When he restarts the computer and
tries again all is well.

Anyone got any ideas what could be causing this. I've never seen
PowerPoint re-size movies like this. I have a lot of experience with
mpegs and avis and not much with wmvs. Could it be there is a
performance hiccup and the wmv automatically resizes to maintain
playback or something???

Any ideas would be much appreciated, or even if you have no solution
but have seen this happen also.

Many Thanks

Gary
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