VLC Media Player Won't Play m4v files in Win 7 64-bit

[basspig]

I'm running VLC 2.0.5 and I've got a problem that's been evading solutions. Since moving to Windows 7 64-bit, I find that VLC Media Player won't play full HD video files that I rendered in Adobe Premiere/Media Encoder. It will only play m2v files in SD, but not m4V files in 1080P. Instead of playback, the player appears to begin play, window client area expands to 1920x1080, but remains black. However, the HDD light comes on and stays on. A look in Windows 7 Resource Manager, Disk tab, reveals that VLC is READING approximately 128,000,000 B/sec for the duration of the 'playback' and WRITING a smaller fraction of that bandwidth. The drives involved are the media files drive and the temp drive, which are separate physical discs. It is almost as if it is redirecting playback to the HDD, but I know of no such setting in VLC to cause that. It does this for a few minutes for a 45-minute video and then stops.
Is there a configuration that I am overlooking that may be causing HD videos to be treated as 'write to disc' instead of to screen? It's only affecting HD videos. All SD stuff plays in the player normally.
Windows Media Player will play the file, but with pauses every 1 second, not a smooth playback. VLC Media Player worked great under XP, but I'm not having any luck with it under Win 7 64-bit. The playback problems seem to be specific to VLC. I suspect a configuration setting, but I am at a loss as to where that might be. Any help would be appreciate.

EDIT: I've pretty much separated the problem videos and the okay videos into two categories: MPEG2 and h.264. Apparently VLC isn't producing any screen output when the file format is h.264.
Oddly, QuickTime 7 can't play the files either. But Windows Media Player can. This situation is exclusive to Windows 7 machines. Our Windows XP machines are not experiencing any playback problems with VLC and h.264 files.

[Lotesdelere]

Try another video output module:
http://wiki.videolan.org/WindowsFAQ-2.0 ... _output.3F

And/or disable/enable GPU acceleration:
http://wiki.videolan.org/WindowsFAQ-2.0 ... age_errors

You can also try to enable or disable some video options such as Overlay and/or Hardware YUV -> RGB conversions.


For testing purposes you may try to disable the power management settings (EPU Engine) of your ASUS motherboard, if you are using one.

[basspig]

I have tried turning off acceleration, overlays, also tried each of the harware methods, with the same result each time. I suppose it must be the Windows 7 video driver for my GeForce 8800GTX.

[Lotesdelere]

Have you tried OpenGL output ?

[basspig]

Yes. Same result.

[Lotesdelere]

Please open Tools -> Messages (set Verbosity to 2) before you start the playback and then paste the full resulting log here or on Pastebin.com if it's too long.

Also upload a short sample of a problematic file to either http://streams.videolan.org/upload/ or to EmbedUpload.com, the latter will upload the file for you to several other hosts and then post the link to the file here.

Cut it with DGsplit and read here about how to do it:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=57724&p=193335#p193335
50 MB max should be enough.

[basspig]

I set the verbosity to 2 and then saved the log file and played an .m4v clip, but the resulting log file was only 1kb and when I open it in Notepad, I see nothing. Is it possible it's all >ASCII 127 characters and can't be viewed in Notepad?