We recently ran into an issue where our users are unable to preview or play embedded YouTube videos in PowerPoint 2013. They are able to insert the videos by following the prompts (Insert > Video > Online Video > YouTube > Etc.). However, when
they try right-clicking and choosing Preview, or try playing the video during a presentation, an error dialog pops up for Internet Explorer, saying it has stopped working (see below). Also, when trying to preview the video, after dismissing the IE error, a
yellow "Video Error" notice pops up saying the video couldn't be played because the browser version is not supported. We currently run IE 10 in our environment (and IE 9 is the minimum requirement,
link), but we've confirmed that the problem persists even with IE 11 and all the latest updates from Windows Update. We have noticed the problem goes away for those who are administrators on the machine, and putting a user having the issue into the Administrators
group also resolves the issue.
We did notice that, by downgrading to IE 9 the problem disappeared and everything worked as anticipated.
We also attempted repairing the Office 2013 installation and updating Adobe Flash and Shockwave, etc., but had no luck. Disable/Uninstalling our antivirus and Microsoft UEV didn't help either. Disabling all IE add-ons and resetting Security levels, etc. also had no effect. We even attempted booting using the "Diagnostic startup" option under MSCONFIG.
We read that Microsoft removed support for Online Videos a while back, then added it back with KB2837627 and KB2817636 (TechNet Blog Post). We decided to uninstall the updates (and any/all superseding updates), just to see what would happen. Using the Insert > ... > YouTube method, the user was able to insert the video, however, trying to right-click the video and select Preview resulted in a PowerPoint dialog stating "Sorry, we cannot play this media object"; attempting to play the video during a presentation resulted in the slide advancing and nothing happening. Using the different embed codes from YouTube (new and old) didn't work either. Reinstalling the latest superseding updates didn't help either.
For now, our only viable workaround is to add our Faculty/Staff to a machine's administrators group on a case-by-case basis. Has anyone else experienced this issue, and/or have a better solution?
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: IEXPLORE.EXE
Application Version: 10.0.9200.16921
Application Timestamp: 537fc9dc
Fault Module Name: urlmon.dll
Fault Module Version: 10.0.9200.16921
Fault Module Timestamp: 537fca02
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0001d433
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.4
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789