The VideoLAN Forums

I have the weirdest problem with VLC 0.9.4. Before playing a video or a video section, VLC will flash very shortly a seemingly random picture that it must have found somewhere on my harddrive.
I have done a search for this in the forums, I hope I didn't miss anything.

I noticed a couple of times already that some sort of picture would occasionally flash up at the beginning of a video. I always dismissed it as being an error in the video that I was watching. But now I was watching a DVD, and every time I switched between menus or chapters, i.e. always in the short pause when switching between "sections" of the DVD, there would also be a picture. I fired up CamStudio screen recording, and took a capture while it was happening. It worked, and in frame-by-frame analysis in VirtualDub I could see that it was a picture of some technical device from a website called Don't Blink - clearly not a picture I would have had anything to do with. However, it's possible that the picture is in a browser cache somewhere.

Then, while playing back that same screen capture video in VideoLAN, another picture would flash up before playback begins. This time it was a cartoon from xkcd. It's quite likely that it could have found that somewhere on my harddrives too, although I wouldn't know where.

The interesting thing is that it is a different picture for every video, but for each video the picture is always the same. This means that I can quit and restart VLC, and then playing the same video would flash the same picture again as before. But still, these pictures have to come from somewhere, yet I can't figure out where.

These are some of my system specs:
Windows Vista Business SP-1 64-bit
ATi Radeon HD 4870 with latest Catalyst 8.9
VLC 0.9.4 with Qt4 interface

Also, it happens for all of OpenGL, GDI, DirectDraw, and Direct3D outputs. If I choose Dummy or ASCII output, then the picture will actually remain clearly and steadily displayed in VLC's main window for the duration of the playback!

I can't for the life of me figure out what could be the cause of this, and if it's actually VLCs fault, what part of it could do such a thing.

Reset your preferences.

I did, but it helps only for the session in which I cleared the preferences, or the first run after I deleted the vlcrc file. Once I close VLC and start it again, the images start appearing again. And they're still the same images for the same video!

Is there some explanation on where the pictures could come from at all? I know that VLC can display JPEG pictures too, but I never used it for that, and it should not know about any folders where they are, considering that most of the pictures it displays, I haven't ever seen myself before.

VLC does open files that you didn't ask to open.

Some display adapters drivers don't clear buffers on creation. At least I remember that 3DS Max used to show up some Quake textures during startup if I had played Quake before starting it. VLC is the only software that shows these symptoms?

i think it's a thumbnail related to some of the text in the meta data or something

my does it all the time, and the pictures will vaguely relate to the file name or the folder etc

Mine does somthing similar to what you are saying, i'm pretty sure. It shows a clump of images, the 1st one (top left) an eye, the 2nd one, a little girl, the 3rd one, i dont even know, the 4th one, a spider, the 5th one, i dont know either, and the 6th one, a person's chin apparently. I have no idea where these images would come from, or why.

I'm also having this problem but only have one picture of a music single I got from apple itune 12 days of christmas for free. Its a photo of maroon 5 holiday gift. But I only have it on 1 of my pc but it seems to be on my other pc as well. Also to mention is that music single is still in a zip file. I'm thinking it may be lodge in the hdd itself like a burn in on a led display.

I think the solution to your question is here

https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/q ... image_gay/