Wow, this is huge. For the longest time I thought the only way to get a movie to play in PowerPoint using just a presentation remote was to change the Play setting to Automatically. The default value is On Click, but that never worked; a click would just take you to the next slide. But there is a way to get it to work, and it requires adding an animation to your movie.
Select the embedded movie, then click the Animations tab. If your window is wide enough, you will see options for Play (this is the one we care about), Pause, Stop as well as Fill Color and Grow/Shrink. Otherwise these are buried under a menu button with a yellow star icon called Emphasis Effects.
However you get to it, click the Play button and it will add an “animation” to the slide that will play the movie on click. With this set, during your presentation you can now click the remote once to bring up the slide with the movie on it, and then click a second time to start the movie playing.
If you want it to play automatically, you can set Start for this animation to with previous.
Comments