PowerPoint 2016 cannot play media

Hello Peter, .

Few more details would help us to provide a better response.

Does this issue occurs in all PowerPoint files or is it specific to particular PowerPoint file?

I suggest you to disable hardware graphics acceleration and check if video clip transition work as expected.

• Open Office PowerPoint application.

• On the File tab, click Options.

• In the Options dialog box, click Advanced.

• In the list of available options, click to uncheck the Disable hardware graphics acceleration and Disable Slide Show hardware graphics acceleration check box.

• Click OK.

You may also refer to the suggestion mentioned in the following Microsoft article and check if it helps.

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Are-you-having-video-or-audio-playback-issues-e0a94444-8ea7-4a00-974b-6ad0d6edc4b1

Please post back with the result and information asked for further assistance.

Thank you.

Hello Parth,

This is the sequence of events as I best recall.

I put together a church powerpoint last Friday as normal. This was done on my desktop computer as usual. It included 1 MP4 file which we have previously used often. On Saturday I transferred the file to the laptop (the problem machine). When testing, I found that the MP4 would not play.

Playing within PowerPoint resulted in the message "cannot play media". The file plays properly in Windows Media Player outside Powerpoint.

I tried several other MP4 files which also play outside Powerpoint, but do nothing when embedded.

I tried an MP3 file embedded in Powerpoint, and that works fine.

I tried deactivating Windows Media Player in System - Windows Features, reboot, activate WMP again, reboot. Still nothing.

By this time, I was out of time, and removed the MP4 from Powerpoint all together.

On Sunday, I needed to hook my laptop to a data projector, so I set my display options to "Only Monitor 2". I need to do this as when we switch data sources away from the laptop and then back again, Windows comes back smaller on the data projector and it's a pain to fix on the fly. I don't know why this happens but it's been that way since I got a Windows 10 laptop. Anyway, when advancing through the slide show, many slides displayed any text as a smudge or a blur (unreadable) moving back a slide then forward a slide made the text readable again. Images however were always displayed correctly.I've never seen this before (and I've been using PowerPoint for many years). This doesn't seem to happen when there is no monitor attached. I don't know if that has anything to do with the MP4 problem.

Later on Sunday, I uninstalled Office 365, rebooted, reinstalled Office 365. Still nothing.

I downloaded and applied all maintenance updates for Windows 10 and Office 365. Still nothing.

I tried converting MP4 files to AVI ... still nothing.

I'm at my wits end.

I thought this might be some kind of virus, so I ran a full scan using Defender as well as an offline scan with defender. It did pick up and delete one file, but I can't remember it's name. It didn't help the problem.

Thanks, Peter.

Hello Peter, .

Few more details would help us to provide a better response.

Does this issue occurs in all PowerPoint files or is it specific to particular PowerPoint file?

I suggest you to disable hardware graphics acceleration and check if video clip transition work as expected.

• Open Office PowerPoint application.

• On the File tab, click Options.

• In the Options dialog box, click Advanced.

• In the list of available options, click to uncheck the Disable hardware graphics acceleration and Disable Slide Show hardware graphics acceleration check box.

• Click OK.

You may also refer to the suggestion mentioned in the following Microsoft article and check if it helps.

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Are-you-having-video-or-audio-playback-issues-e0a94444-8ea7-4a00-974b-6ad0d6edc4b1

Please post back with the result and information asked for further assistance.

Thank you.

Hello Sir

all done as you suggest, pp still shows "cannot play media"

downloaded latest codec files

played previously, what has microsoft done in updates to disable this

why screw with something that works?

Hi Peter,

I run as administrator the Powerpoint and it played! :)

I hope it will help...

Regards,

Ercan

A variation on this theme - after days of banging my head against the wall (including trying the advice above about disabling hardware acceleration), I held Control while launching PowerPoint in Safe Mode. It's worked flawlessly since then. No idea what shook loose as a result, but I don't even need to run PowerPoint as Administrator now to get video to play. 

WOW!!  A super easy 2 second fix.  This is brilliant, thanks SO much for this tip!

A variation on this theme - after days of banging my head against the wall (including trying the advice above about disabling hardware acceleration), I held Control while launching PowerPoint in Safe Mode. It's worked flawlessly since then. No idea what shook loose as a result, but I don't even need to run PowerPoint as Administrator now to get video to play. 

I remember powerpoint having endemic video playback issues even when I was 7 years old, and my teacher couldn't figure out what the problem was. I remember it being the case throughout secondary school, and even today.

It is absolutely pathetic that 2 decades have passed and these issues still are not fixed.

I used the built-in screen recorder that comes with the 2016 version. Still doesn't work. Well, oddly, it works in the slide editor view. But when I go into the presentation view... it does not play. If I click on the video multiple times, I can faintly make out a message "Cannot play media".

Of course it does not tell me why it 'cannot play media'. That would be too reasonable. Instead I have to waste precious hours of my weekend trying to figure out something that should lie in the domain of IT specialists. Ridiculous.