PowerPoint: Video White Screen of complete nothingness

I came across a “feature” of PowerPoint today.

I added a video to a presentation and played it – but all I got was a lovely white screen of nothingness.

So I started Windows Media Player – and it the video was full of lots of lovely sound and motion.

Perhaps it’s a problem with this particular MPEG file, I thought. So converted it the file to WMV. After several minutes of waiting for the transcoding to take place I was amazed to get the same white screen of nothingness.

I tried it one a newer version of PowerPoint (2007), but still the same white screen of nothingness.

After a little searching around the internet using the google I came across the answer. I must admit to being somewhat stunned that I could get caught out by a problem that I thought had been mostly eradicated.

And the answer: the path to the file is too long

Yes, really.

It’s apparently been around forever, perhaps I’m the last to find out?