Videos insterted into Keynote Lost linkage when Relaunch Program

Apple just in case you are listening: this bug has made Keynote too embarrassing to use.

Imagine an Apple "just one more thing" stopping due to corrupted videos, its that bad.

So everything new is now on Powerpoint, sad day when it is more trustworthy.

It is indeed a sad day. Tomorrow, will mark the first time in 13 years that I teach a film lesson in Powerpoint—it works fine, but I had so many well designed Keynote slideshows with carefully timed build and transitions that it's going to take me forever to transfer them (and I'll have to simplify everything to reduce it to the lowest microsoft denominator). I worked with Apple to crush some bugs in iWeb years ago by testing several builds. In the end they fixed it, but, this is the first time I've experienced such a long silence, without any acknowledgment of the issue.

I have used Keynote extensively for many years as a business school faculty member and for a variety of presentations. In every other respect it is a superb tool and a joy to use. But this broken video link problem is both dispiriting and stress inducing. Three weeks ago I had two classes in succession using the same presentation (large multi-streamed class). The first session went perfectly. For the second session however there was a problem with the AV system requiring me to restart my laptop. This in turn broke all of the video links when Keynote was restarted, leading to a stressful and highly unsatisfactory class. I muddled through but it lacked energy and a number of key communication points were lost. I went home feeling pretty low about what had happened. Subsequent classes have gone ok ... but the joy has somewhat gone out of delivering sessions as I am always on edge about whether my embedded videos will actually play. Because video is an essential capability in presentations these days, I really do hope that Apple makes a serious effort to resolve this bug. I am so invested in Keynote over many years that I still remain reluctant to switch to Powerpoint, but for younger staff earlier in their academic careers I no longer recommend Keynote. It is such a shame! Thanks for listening.

Keynote 6.6.2 is out. I wonder if it fixes the bug? Anyone brave enough to try?

I have done some testing with 6.6.2 and so far, no problems. I've inserted five videos into a sample presentation and saved, closed and opened the file about a dozen times.

I'm reluctant to 'confirm' the bug is fixed as I think it would be wise for plenty of others to do this with a range of different videos, file sizes, etc. so we can be sure the sample is varied and large enough to be representative.

Can anyone add to the testing? It doesn't take long.

I wish Apple would confirm that they think they have solved this problem (rather than simply refer to 'bug fixes') so we knew for sure - and better still thank the many who have troubled to report it, to encourage an ongoing community spirit on this kind of thing!

But on the bright side, if it is fixed, many thanks to the engineers who sorted it!

I just opened a damaged file in 6.6.0 - got the error about movies not being found. Went to a slide with a movie file, clicked the video object, clicked the "Replace" button on the Inspector/Format/Movie/File Info " and then selected the original movie, and got this error:

5/11/16 7:30:36.435 AM Keynote[96372]: *** Assertion failure #1: -[TSDMovieCompatibilityChecker initWithAsset:] TSDMovieCompatibilityChecker.m:57 invalid nil value for 'asset'

I upgraded to Keynote 6.6.2, repeated the steps, and got the exact same error:

5/11/16 7:34:27.167 AM Keynote[96646]: *** Assertion failure #1: -[TSDMovieCompatibilityChecker initWithAsset:] TSDMovieCompatibilityChecker.m:57 invalid nil value for 'asset'

I then tried replacing the .MOV file with the same file converted to .MP4 - this time it allowed me.

However, once I closed and re-opened the keynote file, the movie was lost again.

While opening the damaged project file, I get the same errors as before in the Console:

5/11/16 7:37:01.812 AM Keynote[96646]: *** Error: __59-[TSPExternalReferenceDataStorage performReadWithAccessor:]_block_invoke TSPExternalReferenceDataStorage.mm:239 Can't resolve URL

So based on this quick set of tests, the bug is NOT fixed in any way shape or form. Bummer.

Update: I hadn't rebooted my Macbook Pro in 14 days, and in the past that sometimes fixed the issue.

So I rebooted, then opened the damaged file again in keynote 6.6.2. Result: Video is still missing. Clicked the "Replace" button and tried to replace it with a .MOV file: Result: same error. Then I replaced the MOV file with a MP4 file, and this time it worked. Closed and re-opened the project file, and this time the movie file was not lost. And I was able to select either the MOV or MP4 versions.

But I'm pretty sure I had similar experiences with the older Keynote version - things would work better after a reboot (for a while) but eventually would go bad again. I'll report back if I get another failure.

Thanks Michael for the report.

For testing purposes, we may be on safer ground to use new files that don't have a previous corruption that complicates things.

Or, if needing to fix an existing file, you could delete old slides with problematic videos/lost links on them, and reinsert videos on fresh slides, perhaps having changed the video file names first as well - just to ensure that everything is 'new'...

Just a thought.

I've not been teaching over the summer and thus not using Keynote lately - can anyone who has been using it regularly confirm whether the latest updates (including OS X 10.11.6) has finally fixed this issue?

I agree. It shouldn't happen, EVER.

I've resubmitted a new bug report #30351522 in case anyone wants to reference it.