VLC media player - sound but no picture

bobobear · 29-04-2011 02:06PM #1

My VLC player has suddenly stopped working. I can hear audio fine but there's no picture.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling.
I've gone in and played with the audio settings in preferences (I changed them back afterwards).
I even tried installing an older version of vlc.
Nothing works.

I can only imagine that something other than vlc that is causing this problem, some windows setting (I'm running vista).
I also have the same problem with wmp.

Any ideas?

johndoe99 · 29-04-2011 02:23PM

I had a similar issue about 3 years back, my first thought was a codec, but VLC comes with a vast amount of them. Did you install/uninstall any other software during the time this problem began? A system restore might work.

System Restore:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial143.html

Voodu Child · 29-04-2011 02:33PM

VLC doesnt use external codecs or splitters by default so there it should not be a codec issue.

First reset all preferences. (there is a button for it in the preferences).

Then try turning off video acceleration. (preferences > video > accelerated video output).

Remember that VLC needs to be restarted in order for some changes to take effect.

Also I would check your graphics driver properties, some GPUs have controls for video colour/gamma/etc. Again, reset preferences and also see if there is any updates available.

bobobear · 29-04-2011 03:53PM

Thanks for the replies.

I had tried to do a system restore, but for some reason my computer doesn't have any save points registered. I tried to set them up but it's telling me that the function has been disabled by a group administrator. It's my personal computer, not a work one, so I am the administrator. Not really sure why that isn't working.

I tried resetting the preferences in vlc, and turning off video acceleration. Restarted both times (one time it auto-set itself to Japanese, weird). No joy.

I'm not too sure how to reset the graphics driver properties though.

Another weird thing, when I restarted vlc, windows told me that it had changed the colour scheme of windows to windows basic because something wasn't compatible. Strange.

Korvanica · 29-04-2011 04:09PM

Probably an obvious question but did you try a number of video files?

To make sure its not just that one video?

smokedeels · 29-04-2011 04:25PM

http://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/ - just as good if surrender is an option

Voodu Child · 29-04-2011 04:38PM

bobobear wrote: »

I'm not too sure how to reset the graphics driver properties though.

Right-click a blank area of the desktop and one of the options should be a graphics control panel. The options and layout will depend on whether you have an Intel card, or Nvidia, or ATI, but they all should have a way of going back to the default settings.

VLC media player - sound but no picture

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