Microsoft Hot Fix for Video Playback Issue

Most people are aware of Microsoft's occasional upgrades for Windows and Office products that come in the form of Service Packs. But Microsoft also releases "Hot Fixes" for smaller issues and bugs that people run into.

About six months ago, I started experiencing playback issues with videos embedded into PowerPoint 2010 on the PC. For whatever reason, certain videos would simply stop on a particular frame giving a "playback error." They would play fine in Windows Media player and fine in PowerPoint on the Mac. We tried re-encoding the videos 10 different ways, but there would always remain a single frame that PowerPoint couldn't get past.

My friend Echo Swinford experienced similar issues. And since Echo knows more about PowerPoint than most anyone on the planet, I knew I wasn't going crazy.

We brought the issue to the attention of PowerPoint's development team and while it took a bit of time, they identified the issue and released a fix for the issue yesterday in the form of a "Hot Fix."

If you have experienced the issue of a video suddenly and consistently stopping on a single frame (and the video plays fine outside of PowerPoint), download and install the fix here.

As is often the case, if you have not experienced the issue, Microsoft generally recommends not installing the patch.

And this is specifically for PowerPoint 2010.