AVI or WMV?

[NyTeHaWk]

So I've got a safety presentation to give tomorrow. I'm a Marine and have been tasked with giving a 'Safety in the Workplace' power point presentation and having issues with my videos in the presentation playing on DOD/government computer. I created the presentation at home on my personal computer which has all the codecs imaginable, and can successfully play all the .avi videos in the presentation just fine. But when I bring the presentation and all the videos to work and attempt to play the videos, I recieved an error:

'Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.'

I'm sure that the governement computer I'm using doesn't have any codecs installed on it (running windows XP with Office 2010). So I'm wondering if I convert the .AVI's to .WMV's, will this fix the problem and allow the video to play on a computer that has no codecs installed? I would go ahead and try this now, but since I'm at work, i can not download anything on a government computer to try and convert to .WMV, so I'm asking here because I'm in a rush to find a fix before the end of the day.

Thank you for any help...

[jagabo]

I'm sure that the governement computer I'm using doesn't have any codecs installed on it (running windows XP with Office 2010). So I'm wondering if I convert the .AVI's to .WMV's, will this fix the problem and allow the video to play on a computer that has no codecs installed?

It should work. You might want to stick with the older WMV1 and WMA1 codecs in case the computers don't have the latest and can't download them from Microsoft.

[PuzZLeR]

I've done presentations often, and have used PowerPoint lots.

Experience and heresay dictates use WMV here - yup, Microsoft office apps, Microsoft player and Microsoft codec, all on a Microsoft O/S,... seems logical.

And yes, I too will suggest to use an older version of WMV, as Jagabo states. This, at least to me, guarantees a common denominator of compatibility, since some older systems may not be familiar with, although open-standard, VC-1/WMV9.

[jagabo]

For example, XP (even SP3, I think) does not come with a WMV3 (WMV9) decoder. WMP will have to download it from Microsoft.