no more video... Help!

[VJ]

Hello,

I'm having this odd issue on my laptop: it is no longer showing movies; not in WMP, not in zoomplayer. The movie plays, but the image remains black. Tried with .wmv and .avi.

I have the impression overlays are still present, but don't know for sure. Occasionally, I see an upside down frame, but I cannot reproduce this systematically.
Any suggestions on how to solve this?

I scanned the hdd for errors (none found), booted in safe mode, rebooted a couple of times, but all to no avail.
What else to try?

Jörg

[VJ]

Moving the slider in the "troubleshooting" tab of "graphic properties" changes the behaviour. I can get it up to where the accompagning text mentions directX. So now I'm downloading DirectX, and I have downloaded the drivers (will uninstall the current video drivers and install them again).

Jörg

[Helevitia]

Sounds like you might have too many codecs installed. I can't remember the name of the program, but it allows you to see all codecs installed on your system and enable/disable them.

[Rakido]

you could check out CodecInstaller, might be helpful:

Ever had a movie where you could only hear the sound and there were no video? Or only video and no sound?
That's almost certainly a codec missing! CodecInstaller is here to help you understand which codec you need and to let you install it in minutes.

CodecInstaller is a Windows program that detects the Audio and Video codecs installed on your system, analyzes files to understand which codecs they require and suggests you to install them.

CodecInstaller

[VJ]

I only have FFDShow and DScaler installed. This was the case before too (no changes to that). Both are installed using Altiris, so I can easily disable them (to no avail)

But how would having too many codes be affected by the performance slider?
(I will try CodecInstaller)

Reinstalling the drivers didn't help.
Tonight I'll remove all codecs, video driver, reboot and reinstall videodriver and directx...


Jörg

[Mehen]

Try quicktime alternative/media player classic too.

[Gurm]

QTA/MPC use DirectShow, they aren't going to help.

See if VLC works, it is codecless.

And you can use G-Spot to see how Windows is trying to render your files, and from there troubleshoot the codecs involved. It might be a media splitter or something.

[VJ]

I uninstalled anything related: FFDShow, DScaler, WMP11 and even the video drivers. I then installed videodrivers, directX. The program CodecInstaller lists only Microsoft Codecs and 2 Intel Codecs. I then installed WMP11, but the problem persists.

Telling WMP not to use video overlays solves the issue, and allows me to play anything I want. Oddly enough, I can adjust image settings for the overlay in my video driver, and the overlay preview works in this context. Somehow, it seems that the overlay cannot be used by applications...

Jörg

[VJ]

Found it!!!

I hadn't gone to the overlay settings in the new drivers (as I could access the before, I figured this would be the same). Just to check, I opened the overlay settings, and saw that the gamma for the overlay was set to 0.
It was very noticable, as the preview box was black; I'm 100% sure this was not the case before I uninstalled the previous driver (the preview box showed colour).

Dunno how/why that gamma setting changed, but I'm glad it is over...
(oh, video card is an Intel 915GM with the latest driver)

Jörg

[Claymonkey]

Yeah intel's graphics drivers are kind of bleh. Case in point I'm having the problem with my new work laptop not playing my favorite screensavers http://www.reallyslick.com/ since they disable openGL for screensavers because "coders don't write them properly". The old trick of renaming them from .scr to .sCr also stopped working.

[VJ]

FWIW, the issue resurfaced when enabling a second monitor...


Jörg