VLC pixelated gray screen

[gohanrage]

I am always getting the grey screen when I start a video.

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 series. I checked for updates. VLC says I have the latest version. I find it rather annoying. its not even the first frame. I start the video its clear and then I get the grey screen a few seconds in to the video clip.

[RaDDx]

You know what is more Annoying than a pixelated screen while watching a movie, is looking to a forum for an answer to a solution, and all everyone keeps posting is "I am having the same issue" instead of actually posting a solution......The original poster is looking for a reply with a solution to their problem, not continual posts from people saying they are having the same issue, and offering no solutions....FFS...

Here is a SOLUTION that worked for me: iN VLC, Go into Tools, Select Preferences, select "All" at the very bottom, select "Input Codecs" in the list, to the right, change "File Caching (ms)" to 300 and Network Caching (ms) TO 1000. You can try a variety of numbers, these are the ones that worked for me.

[Vincent Summers]

Hm. I'm not a computer whiz, but I am an observing person. I believe I experience this issue mainly when I also have a browser window open.

It is my suspicion Windows is undertaking sneaky means to discourage VLC use in favor of Windows Media Player.

[lauredis]

solution that works.

Download K-Lite codec pack, and then use MPC-HC x64

works fine guaranteed . Finally after months of getting grey vids I can see my vids

[thesandvolcano]

The previous poster who said this issue is not power management related is wrong. The problem is caused by the AHCI power management feature's, HIPM & DIPM. Specifically, your mechanical hard disk cannot handle these power states as well as your ssd. This is why watching a movie from the ssd works better than mechanical storage using AHCI over SATA. Another poster suggested increasing the file cache which will lessen the phenomena, but HIPM & DIPM will still cause problems. I have known this problem/solution for years and am frankly shocked that this is still an issue in 2016. So much so I have created this account for y'all.

Solution 1: Switch mechanical drive over to IDE mode, if you wish to retain HIPM & DIPM functionality for your ssd.
Solution 2: Use a RamDisk (ImDisk is free) to pre-cache media to RAM.
Solution 3: Download the *.reg files from this site: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/17 ... -dipm.html. Install into registry. The reg file makes HIPM & DIPM options available in Windows 7. Finally, open your advanced power management options and disable HIPM & DIPM under the 'hard disk' section.

I use 'Solution 3' and can confirm it works on my old AMD based rig, and my new x99 Intel - Nvidea rig. If I had known this problem would persist for so long, I would have created an account here years ago. In my opinion the VLC team have been very slow in addressing this issue as there must be a programatic solution, as not all media players are affected as bad by HIPM & DIPM.

[k9dog]

This was a bit annoying: I got various machines. With graphics messing up like desciped, I been flipping VLC settings without much luck.
Other players didn't have problems.
The problem turned out to be exactly what thesandvolcano described.
I don't know it would be possible, but it would be nice if vlc inhibited these settings or at least informed about their current settings. I might look for an extension for when laptop isn't plugged in.

[obiwanbill]

Thank you sir, your solution worked for me too.

I was doing file transfer testing yesterday, because I thought it was my problem. I have two file servers and I was testing file transfers speeds.

CASE 1 -> Playing an ISO from the local SSD (with VLC default settings)
This works perfect. I tested it on a MacBook Late 2008 and a MacBook Pro Mid 2012. Both Perfect. But, this isn't what I want. Transferring an ISO from my RAID array takes 1 to two hours. If I have to do that, for every movie I want to play, that sucks!

What I really want is to play my ISO's directly from my File Servers.

CASE 2 -> Playing an ISO from the File Server (with modified settings below)
After extensive testing I discovered my file transfer speed from my File Server (RAID 5 array of 1.5TB HDDs) to my MacBook Pro Mid 2012 with a Crucial MX300 SSD is ... ~25MB/s (or 200Mbps on a 1Gbps Switch). There was no other traffic at the same time. Hmm ... if other people are getting faster file transfers I want to know what you are doing. I was testing with "rsync". Anyway, bottom line I was still getting the artifacts described in this article.

After following RaDDx's suggestions ... I maxed out ALL settings ...
File Caching = 6000ms
Live Capture caching = 6000ms
Disc Caching = 6000ms
Network Caching = 6000ms

My artifacts on my screen disappeared. ALL my ISO's play PERFECT on both my MacBook Pro Mid 2012 (4GB RAM) and my MacBook Late 2008(8GB RAM). I also noticed that ... when playing my ISO the network transfer speed is about 5MB/sec. What that means is, I think , as long as you are playing your Movie (ISO, mkv, whatever) from a device that can sustain at least that speed, (perhaps double or 10MB/sec), with the settings suggested by RaDDx I think it should work.

I hope this helps the next guy.

You know, this has been a thorn in my side for many years now and I really wasn't sure where the problem was. I thought I remembered this working better with an earlier release of VLC and I was right because another person confirmed it here. Oh well. Please VLC, consider changing your default settings so this works "at default settings". Or, at least explain what the consequence is for the changes we are making.

Thanks,

Bill

PS. I just created this account to post this reply. Obviously I am a little excited to finally have this solution!

You know what is more Annoying than a pixelated screen while watching a movie, is looking to a forum for an answer to a solution, and all everyone keeps posting is "I am having the same issue" instead of actually posting a solution......The original poster is looking for a reply with a solution to their problem, not continual posts from people saying they are having the same issue, and offering no solutions....FFS...

Here is a SOLUTION that worked for me: iN VLC, Go into Tools, Select Preferences, select "All" at the very bottom, select "Input Codecs" in the list, to the right, change "File Caching (ms)" to 300 and Network Caching (ms) TO 1000. You can try a variety of numbers, these are the ones that worked for me.

[RockyTDR]

After following RaDDx's suggestions ... I maxed out ALL settings ...
File Caching = 6000ms

6000 ms = 6 seconds... which is NOT the maximum. VLC allows to chache up to 60 000 ms (60 seconds or 1 minute).

[Hogar]

Ok, so I have the same problem and I've tried many of the proposed solutions - nothing helped with the VLC player. I am also using the NAS hard drive for viewing videos on MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013, 2,3 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM). It is a TERRIBLE experience, the drop-outs and pixelisation are very frequent. I even tried with fixing the Western Digital Intellisleep issue with the HDD in NAS.

I then tried another player - MPV. It worked PERFECT with any video codec I tried. But it lacks a lots of customization and hotkeys that VLC have.

THEN, I did this:
- In VLC Preferences, I selected "Input/Codecs" section (NOTE that I can/t find this option when you turn on the "SHOW ALL" options, only when "Basic" options are chosen);
- Under "Network", open "Edit default application settings for network protocols"
- Everywhere where it was an option, I chose "MPV" instead of "VLC" or "Finder"; only two (RTMP and SFTP) had "VLC" as the only option. REMINDER: I previously installed MPV player on my Mac.

Since then - BOOM, NO PROBLEMS WITH PLAYBACK!!!

[pjcamp]

Cache settings don't fix it.

Hardware on or off doesn't fix it.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with hard drive speed since the same file from the same hard drive plays perfectly in Windows Media Player as well as in MPV.

It has everything to do with VLC's decoding and if I knew a way to downgrade to a point before White Whale, or whatever its called, I would try that.

[drloveduke]

So I've tried several of the suggestions on here.

File Caching = 6000ms etc. - did nothing at all
Tools - preferences - video - untick ---didn't help
Downloading K-lite codec pack -didnt help VLC but did let me play with windows media player. WMP is kinda juddery when there is a pan or zoom but no grey screens at all.
So unfortunately I'll be using WMP for now. I hope VLC can fix this issue though cause it's what I'd like to use if it worked.

[jokerzz81]

Nvidia system control
Adjust video color settings
Select, With the nvidia settings
advanced setting
Select dynamic range 0-255
And save

screenshot http://share-your-photo.com/4610142005

That was my solution
I can not good english was translated via google

[aref]

Hi, for anyone who has changed their VLC and Power Management settings and STILL experiencing grey & pixelated screens, you may want to see if your laptop is overheating.

I spent countless hours trying different settings, however the only solution I found was to prevent my laptop from overheating.

Hope this helps

[computerguy]

This is extremely annoying when it happens, although I've noticed that it only seems to happen when another process is making heavy I/O demands.

Frankly I'd prefer if VLC just stalled for a moment rather than having decode errors which cause this grey screen. I've tried disabling frame skip and all the other options that I could think of, but nothing helps. There must be some way - some setting - that will make VLC wait if necessary to read the required data instead of just turning grey. Does anybody have any suggestions?

[thesandvolcano]

This is extremely annoying when it happens, although I've noticed that it only seems to happen when another process is making heavy I/O demands.

Frankly I'd prefer if VLC just stalled for a moment rather than having decode errors which cause this grey screen. I've tried disabling frame skip and all the other options that I could think of, but nothing helps. There must be some way - some setting - that will make VLC wait if necessary to read the required data instead of just turning grey. Does anybody have any suggestions?

While I don't speak for the VLC team, the short answer is no. Resource contention problems sepecifically regarding mechanical drives has always been there. It generally is not the responsibility of each software vender to monitor and adjust it's programs behaviour, based on current/predicted system load. That responsibility has always belonged to the operating system.

If you have read my listed solutions to this problem up the page a little, your particular problem could be solved by precaching media to ram. Heavy IO on a mechanical disk will inevitably result in this grey-pixelation, as will HIPM/DIPM enabled mechanical drives over AHCI-SATA links. The read request simply cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner.

[computerguy]

This is extremely annoying when it happens, although I've noticed that it only seems to happen when another process is making heavy I/O demands.

Frankly I'd prefer if VLC just stalled for a moment rather than having decode errors which cause this grey screen. I've tried disabling frame skip and all the other options that I could think of, but nothing helps. There must be some way - some setting - that will make VLC wait if necessary to read the required data instead of just turning grey. Does anybody have any suggestions?

While I don't speak for the VLC team, the short answer is no. Resource contention problems sepecifically regarding mechanical drives has always been there. It generally is not the responsibility of each software vender to monitor and adjust it's programs behaviour, based on current/predicted system load. That responsibility has always belonged to the operating system.

If you have read my listed solutions to this problem up the page a little, your particular problem could be solved by precaching media to ram. Heavy IO on a mechanical disk will inevitably result in this grey-pixelation, as will HIPM/DIPM enabled mechanical drives over AHCI-SATA links. The read request simply cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner.

I don't think you understood my post. First of all, no other video player that I've seen has had this problem. Secondly, the issue isn't that the data isn't read, the issue is that VLC goes blindly on to try to keep playing when the data hasn't been read, resulting in video stream corruption, which makes everything go grey. If it simply paused the playback until the data was available, it wouldn't have this problem. There's no practical reason why pausing a video and then resuming it should corrupt the data stream in this manner.

[thesandvolcano]

This is extremely annoying when it happens, although I've noticed that it only seems to happen when another process is making heavy I/O demands.

Frankly I'd prefer if VLC just stalled for a moment rather than having decode errors which cause this grey screen. I've tried disabling frame skip and all the other options that I could think of, but nothing helps. There must be some way - some setting - that will make VLC wait if necessary to read the required data instead of just turning grey. Does anybody have any suggestions?

While I don't speak for the VLC team, the short answer is no. Resource contention problems sepecifically regarding mechanical drives has always been there. It generally is not the responsibility of each software vender to monitor and adjust it's programs behaviour, based on current/predicted system load. That responsibility has always belonged to the operating system.

If you have read my listed solutions to this problem up the page a little, your particular problem could be solved by precaching media to ram. Heavy IO on a mechanical disk will inevitably result in this grey-pixelation, as will HIPM/DIPM enabled mechanical drives over AHCI-SATA links. The read request simply cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner.

I don't think you understood my post. First of all, no other video player that I've seen has had this problem. Secondly, the issue isn't that the data isn't read, the issue is that VLC goes blindly on to try to keep playing when the data hasn't been read, resulting in video stream corruption, which makes everything go grey. If it simply paused the playback until the data was available, it wouldn't have this problem. There's no practical reason why pausing a video and then resuming it should corrupt the data stream in this manner.

I understood your post and humbly suggest that you haven't understood mine. Here is my 'guess' as to whats going on. From my university days I remember video encoding involved the use of 'key-frames' and it is these frames only that continue to play when a read request cannot be fulfilled. I'm betting all the key-frames are read into ram at the start of a stream and are the sole reason VLC continues to play at all. Now someone somewhere probably thought this a 'robust' solution so as not to stall/break/desync the stream under resource restricting scenarios.

I have also pondered why other video players avoid this particular problem and here's my two-cents. The 'other' player reads in much larger chunks of data and makes sure to issue a read for the next chunk well before the last chunk has been processed, thus ensuring any finer grained power management (HIPM/DIPM) gets mitigated, along with (but less reliably) your basic IO contention on mechanical drives.

In all honesty your requesting an enforced pause as opposed to pixelation doesn't sound unreasonable. Pseudo: "If pNextReadBuffer != FULL Then PAUSE_PLAY" doesn't seem to difficult a task. But what happens when the competing process (Defrag for example) fails to relinquish the disk for the next couple hours? Any program is going to have problems here. Even a 'read well ahead' type player is going to have a problem here. Short of reading the entire file into ram, we are going to get problems here. Strictly speaking it is the OS's responsibility to prevent these kinds of problem through pre-emptive (or is it non pre-emptive?) scheduling.

I should also admit to be a little confused regarding your last sentence. Your first post indicates 'heavy I/O' conditions, but the last sentence of your second post indicates power management related. In any case the result is resource contention/data starvation and has 'practical' implications/considerations beyond the basics I have now elucidated on.

[ream]

I've had this forever, thought it was hardware, but it happens pretty much with every (new) computer. Happens from SSD too.

Occuring every minute or so.

The comment above by jokerzz81 fixed it partially. I changed the dynamic range and the grey is no longer there, however, it still happens because I hear the sound stuttering just like it did before, only without the picture turning grey. Watching a documentary is "unwatchable" because of stuttering.

I will next change the buffering time and see how it goes. I have a feeling it's a buffering problem.

I have a feeling this is happening to millions of people, since I experience this on different machines. It does NOT happen in WMP, PowerDVD, Classic Player, it's a VLC related problem.

By the way THIS HAPPENS TO AUDIO ONLY FILES TOO. For longer files, like audio books, the stuttering happens too! You can then rewind and see that's it's not the file, it's the VLC. Does not happen with other programs.

Updating to the latest version did not fix a thing.

[thesandvolcano]

I've had this forever, thought it was hardware, but it happens pretty much with every (new) computer. Happens from SSD too.

Occuring every minute or so.

The comment above by jokerzz81 fixed it partially. I changed the dynamic range and the grey is no longer there, however, it still happens because I hear the sound stuttering just like it did before, only without the picture turning grey. Watching a documentary is "unwatchable" because of stuttering.

I will next change the buffering time and see how it goes. I have a feeling it's a buffering problem.

I have a feeling this is happening to millions of people, since I experience this on different machines. It does NOT happen in WMP, PowerDVD, Classic Player, it's a VLC related problem.

By the way THIS HAPPENS TO AUDIO ONLY FILES TOO. For longer files, like audio books, the stuttering happens too! You can then rewind and see that's it's not the file, it's the VLC. Does not happen with other programs.

Updating to the latest version did not fix a thing.

I have only just noticed that I'v been posting to the "Mac OSX Troubleshooting" part of the forum. Ooops! The problem and solution I have posted should really belong to the Windows part of the forums! So Ream, whatever OS your on your gonna need to start ruling things out. If I were you I would get hold of some free ramDisk software and see how it reads off that. I only suggest this because I am absolutely certain it is caused by HIPM/DIPM on my last two rigs.

I to have my nVidea DR set 0-255, but on my rig it definately has nothing to do with this problem. I simply like deeper blacks.

[kapiken]

I am having this problem as well, early 2011 MBP with Mountain Lion and VLC version 2.2.4 64-bit.

It would usually only happen whenever I moved the laptop while playing something (like for instance plopping it down on a pillow after standing up), the screen would flash for a few seconds and go back to normal. But a few minutes ago, a movie started freezing up while I was doing some network and CPU intensive tasks, leading me to think it was not the HDD as I previously thought. The majority of what I play are mp4 files.

The 6000ms trick worked for the remainder of the file, but it was only 10 minutes or so. I may reinstall the player or downgrade to another version as there is still no solution to the playlist on top issue.

[kapiken]

I do not see a way to edit my previous post so I will have to bump to update.

I downgraded to the 32-bit 2.0.10 version, and while I still experience a slight pause whenever I "plop" my laptop down (the only way I know how to induce the problem condition), I no longer experience green or gray screen scrambling. In other words, the video picture stays the way it should be. I have increased the caching just in case, but this is an acceptable solution. The only tradeoff is that I lose on demand window scaling.

[skippi]

I also have windows 7 64 bit and cannot edit any MP4 video without it then greying out as described above. It is nothing to do with the video as it was captured on a 12MB pixel camera and it plays well in media player.

I've tried deleting vlc and redownloading

[Lilly Begonia]

Ah! I'm having this issue too, with VLC 2.2.5.1 and It's happening across my network on the new machine, and on the machine I have the videos on. Both are late 2012 Mac Minis, one with 8gb memory and one with 16gb memory, both running 10.12.4 Sierra, networked via WiFi and CAT5 ethernet. The videos are on 4 WD 5tb USB disks which are on a 13 port USB 3.0 hub, so I don't think my network is the issue. Most of my videos are mp4 format but the format doesn't seem to matter, it happens with all the videos and on both machines. I very much need a solution to this issue. I've used only VLC player for years, and I don't want to switch. For me the video locks up for a while, and when it starts again I get that gray pixelation for a few seconds. This happens every couple minutes. I have 14.2tb of video I'd like to be able to enjoy in VLC player, but maybe I just need to find a new player that doesn't do this. I don't know, I'm really stumped at this point.

[vogelscheuche]

Same Issue here. Grey pixeled scenes by playing .avi files, but MKV have no problem.

Latest VLC 2.2.5.1 64bit on Mac Pro 5.1 with GTX680.

Fresh install of latest Sierra 10.12.5, standard settings, nothing helps.

EDIT: Setting Cache to 6000 ms seems to fix it by now.

[Lilly Begonia]

I'm at 10.12.5 now too, and nothing helps. One cannot but hope that Videolan can at last address this issue that is affecting so many of their loyal users as it has gone on for far too long without redress. Without corrective measures on their part I don't see how VLC player can continue.