The VideoLAN Forums

I tried opening a video today in VLC but it would not show anything. The sound works but the video shows nothing but dark grey. I've reinstalled it several times, reset all the preferences, rebooted my computer, and nothing has worked. All it shows is dark grey where the video should be. I don't know what went wrong since it usually works perfectly.

Any ideas?

yeah .. i got the same problem too any help ?

I got the same problem too... how come no one reply with a solution yet?

You may have updated DirectX or the drivers or your graphic card. Make sure you use the latest version for both.

Also try disabling overlay in the preferences.

I just watched a video with this program the other day, but now it will not load. Neither will anything else. I haven't changed my drivers or anything, so I can't figure it out. It acts as if it's playing but there is no video or sound, the window doesn't even expand as if there was a video there.

And you really resetted the preferences?
Are there errors in the Messages window?

I'm a different poster than the previous ones.

I even redownloaded it and reset the preferences, and nothing. There are no errors, it says it was successfully opened.

I have this problem as well, though normally all I have to do to fix it is reset preferences and then restart my computer. Kind of annoying though.

I just installed it and I had dark grey as well, but I turned off overlay and it works now.

I've had this problem before, but usually it happens right when I'm about to reinstall Windows anyway. o_O It is annoying, though... Sometimes there doesn't seem to be any way to fix it.

how do u turnoff overlay in vlc

Have the same problem. It just stopped working all of the sudden. No new changes

You can turn off overlay in the preferences, Video section (you need to show the advanced options).

but cant prove that it was that actual update. Overlay stopped working on one of my two monitors after installing itunes 6.

To fix it I reinstalled VLC. No improvement. After that I went through my graphic driver settings and overlay. Nothing changed. After that I performed a system restore to before Itunes was installed an voila it worked again. Itunes 6 does contain some new video-feaures so there could be something going on there... dont know though...

The "turn off overlays" trick worked for me !! Thanks.

The "turn off overlays" trick worked for me !! Thanks.

also for me , thank you!!!!!

The "turn off overlays trick" solved the problem for me, too. Thanks!

For what it's worth, in case it will help anyone in diagnosing the problem: I had the same symtoms occur also, and the only system change that had taken place was updating Yahoo Messenger. So it seems as if there's some interaction going on behind the scenes here; not sure what it might be...

Disabling overlay did nothing for me. =\

As an addendum to the above, my video card is close to dying as it frequently overheats, displays artifacts and some special effects in games are no longer displayed at all. I noticed in the tooltip that overlay is something hardware-acceleration related, is there anything else of the sort I could also disable to fix the problem? WMP is still working fine.