The VideoLAN Forums

Every time I reinstall Windows, VLC works for a few months and then this bug appears that makes it completely unusable. When in fullscreen mode, the mouse cursor has to be visible overtop of the video, or it won't display correctly. It just shows one row of pixels repeated down the entire screen like this. If I move it out of the video area (to the edge of the screen where it's not visible, or onto a second monitor, though it happens with only one monitor too), it does this. If I just leave it sitting there on top of the video, after a few seconds it disappears and this happens anyway! Hardware acceleration, overlay on/off, DirectX, OpenGL, hardware YUV, triple buffering, different interfaces, none of the options seem to have any effect on it. Happens with every video, DVDs, every output module, etc. The only way I've ever got it to stop doing this is to reinstall the entire OS and I don't really feel like doing that just because one program is broken.

OpenGL output is also broken in another way. Not only does it do that, but the output is 640x480 in a 1280x1024 black box in fullscreen mode.

Upgrade your video card drivers and directX drivers, and try to keep with "DirectX video output" or at the very least "DirectX 3D video output".

The video drivers are already up to date. By "DirectX drivers" do you mean DX itself? Is there a later version available for WinXP than 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)? Wikipedia has a nice version list where the only later version is DX10 which is not available for XP.

Check Microsoft for DirectX runtime. DirectX 9c is updated every few months.

MS' website is such a nightmare to navigate... -_- I found this that just says 9.0c, and several pages about DX10. Was there a specific page you had in mind?

Those look a little outdated; try this: DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2007)

OK, that partially fixed the problem, but created more. It still happens if I use DirectX output but not DirectX 3D output. However, if I try to run the video on my second monitor, maximized or fullscreen, CPU usage skyrockets and everything runs very slowly, as if it's not using hardware acceleration at all. I found Windows GDI Output doesn't do it anymore either, but it has its own problems: the menu won't pop up in fullscreen mode and it doesn't render at all (windowed or not) on the second screen.

Try turning off "Overlay video ouptut" ((Select VLC) Tools > Video > Overlay video output).

That got Direct3D rendering a bit faster on the second screen, but the lag is still there. DirectX and GDI weren't affected at all. With GDI I can actually drag between the two, even drop it right in the middle, and have the video rendered only on one half of the window, as if overlay was still on. (I even restarted VLC after turning it off.)

Thanks for helping me get it at least useable, now if I could just get it working on both screens... >_>