Figuring out how PowerPoint plays movies and sounds can be perplexing to say the least.

Andrew May has written two new MSDN articles on the subject:

1. The first article talks about how PowerPoint plays your multimedia file.  There are some nice flow charts that show the process PowerPoint uses to decide which media player to use. Andrew also talks about how PowerPoint picks a codec to play your multimedia.
2. The second article for VBA programmers has lots of code showing how to insert a media file into a presentation, for instance.

For more of the basics on how to insert a media file, check out this Sounds and Video tutorial.