Yesterday evening, after driving through the torrential rain that afflicted Interstate 35 North in Texas, causing me to miss my exit and travel lost for an hour (yes, I’m using this to justify a GPS to my spouse) on my way to present in Dallas, Tx, I finally arrived, a bit tired and with a piercing headache. I ignored both conditions and jumped into revamping my presentation for the Meadows Principal Improvement Program (MPIP2008) and immediately realized, “Oh heck, I’ve got a BIG problem.”

For some reason, Keynote presentation program was not playing the sound in my videos, even though I knew they worked fine. I tried playing them in VLC Media Player and everything worked fine. For some mysterious reason, the sound would not play on the videos when in Keynote. Since I knew this problem was restricted to Keynote, I asked my twitter network for help–Lisa Durff and Tim Holt responded, but to no avail.

Suddenly, I decided to try Quicktime and see if Quicktime could play the videos with sound. Nope, didn’t work there. But at least I knew Quicktime was the problem…after all, Keynote and Quicktime go together! So, I uninstalled Quicktime with AppDelete–a free application that deletes all your preferences and removes anything related to Quicktime except document files from your machine to ensure a clean install–and then downloaded a new version, installed again on my Mac OS X Tiger machine.

The audio in the video didn’t work.

It occurred to me that I might have a codec problem, and as such, downloaded Perian and installed it. it worked.

On the phone with Wes Fryer, he shared the same problem (he’s running Leopard). I encouraged him to try my solution and see if it would work for him. Anyone else encountered this?