VLC pixelated gray screen

[gaki]

Hi guys, I have 2011 i7 mbp 16 gig ram, but every once in a while when I am watching movies or videos using VLC it lags for second and than it show pixelated gray video for 5-6 seconds and it continues normally. This never happened to me on windows computer which is less powerful. What is solution for this problem.



P.S. I am running latest VLC.

[gaki]

anyone???

[fkuehne]

This is due to a corrupted in your video stream (a I-frame is missing once in a while). VLC 2.2 will be able to deal better with those situations in some formats, but it won't be perfect because VLC cannot invent missing information.

[ccnp11]

I think this may not be the issue. I have precisely the same problem (MBP, 16GB RAM) except much more frequent. For some files this happens every few seconds. However, if I go back in the movie a second or two the area that was greyed and pixelated will play properly until the next time this happens and so on. The information appears to be there but VLC isn't playing it correctly. It acts just like a buffering problem- plays fine for a bit, hangs and degrades the video, then plays fine for a bit. This happens with older, known good files as well and has become a serious issue since my last VLC update.

[_mag]

I have got the same problem very frequently on windows 7. I think (at least sometimes) the wrong part of the video is played back when these grey screens emerge (jumping back in time; lag, afterwords 'normal' again). And it cannot be due to missing or corrupt data as I can replay the scene without this error.

[imdbadboy]

i have the same problem - vlc 2.1.3 windows 8.1 64bit

[oldschool]

Same problem. Windows 7 64 bit, VLC 2.1.3 Rincewind. Playing from local hard disk, no network streaming involved.

[oneoff]

I had this issue and tried something I thought might be related as a fix, and saved this thread to post to in case it worked. I think this may be more about the drive than the software, but obviously the software is part of it, as the issue is not apparent in GOM Player (only used it last night for limited testing). I have a Western Digital Green WD20EARX drive. That drive and many other Green and Red drives from WD have Intellipark which by default forces the head to park after 8 seconds of no "activity." They also usually have 64MB cache (may or may not contribute). This combined with VLC playback could account for the head parking often, and the time taken to move the head back to position could be causing the issue. I had the files on a WD Black drive with no issues. I dumped them onto this WD Green drive (Fantom warranty replacement/!downgrade!) and the problems began. A full defrag didn't change the issue. The video would at different intervals, especially when unpausing, go into the grey, embossed-like imaging shown in the first post for 5 to 6 seconds, then correct. Throughout playback, there would also be frequent moments like this that only lasted a second. Trying to duplicate the "bad spot" proved impossible as it would play fine the second time.

This also is something interesting to try if you think it's not stupid of WD to use this technology: open Crystal DiskInfo tool and look at the SMART data for a green drive (I have "10 [DEC]" setting in the menu under "Function, Advanced Features, Raw values"), select another drive, then go back to the Green drive after about 8 seconds. Notice how the Load/Unload Cycles count is higher (didn't do that for the non "green" drives you may have, did it?). That's just from SMART being accessed. Think about how often it will happen from opening explorer or a file dialog... get the picture? I have an almost 5 year old WD Black drive with Load/Unload Cycle Count of 1405 and this Green drive powered on for less than 2 weeks has 1407 from rare usage (2 days of accessing files for maybe 2 hours total and noticing the VLC issue). That would have ruined this drive within a year without the fix. It was at 1350 the night before I applied the fix, and I did not directly access the drive or files in explorer, etc. between those times. It's been at 1407 since.

My solution was to use WDIDLE3 as detailed on this youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2eYyRI_F98 (with link to the custom UBCD used below the video). It's not the best video, I'll agree if anyone says. Would have been nice for him to pull back from the screen enough for us to actually read what he was describing. But maybe it will help enough to make it through. You will have to make a bootable CD/DVD/USB stick from the iso file listed under the video. Make sure to power down/power up the drive after changing the setting or it will act all weird (turn off the drive, then back on, if powered by the PC's power supply, just turn off the PC). Also make sure you ONLY have the WD GREEN/RED DRIVE(S) hooked up when you do this. This issue (Intellipark) does not effect BLUE or BLACK series drives, and the software does nothing for other brand HDD or SSD, but could mess up other drives if attached. This fixed the issue as far as I can tell from the few hours I've watched since the change. I have no idea which specific models work/don't work with this fix, so don't ask. I will not revisit this thread unless I want to add to or amend my post. There is also a way in Linux to do the same thing. Do a search if you prefer using in Linux. If you are using another brand of hard drive, hopefully a search will give similar fix.

[Miss_Lana]

Same issue. This only started when I upgraded to 2.1.3. Everything else is exactly the same as before I upgraded (RAM, HD hasn't been removed or corrupted, etc).

[psyborgue]

I have the same issue on a MacBook Pro 15" Retina (late 2013). To attempt to resolve it, I switched the the "VDA framework" option hoping that the HW would do a better job. Only thing that did was change the color of the corruption from gray to green. Changing power management settings in OSX to use the dedicated GPU didn't seem to matter either. The file is definitely not the problem, nor a corrupted storage media, as it does this with every single mkv I play, locally or over the network. Same files also play fine in XBMC (although that player has it's own issue with full screen, resolution changes, and gpu switching). Funny this is, this also happened with my old MBP (late 07, 8600m), but I'm unable to test w/ it now as it's currently running Ubuntu server.

[andres.ledesma]

Hey guys, I managed to fix this on my computer. First I unchecked the "Accelerated video output ( Overlay )" option in the Video Settings. I also unchecked the "Use hardware YUV -> RGB conversions". That really helped but still I got the grey pixeled screen, though less frequent. The next thing I did is to switch the graphics card to "High Performance". Now, this might not be the case in every laptop, but in this case my laptop has two graphic cards. The integrated one is made by Intel and it is supposed to increase battery life. The other card is an ATI ( quite powerful ) . So far it was almost perfect, I managed to get the grey pixeled screen once in a full movie. The last thing you want to try is to use a better drive. In my case, my laptop has an HDD 5400 RPM and an SSD. So it turns out that when I open the video files from the HDD I have the same issue, I believe that this happens due to the slow read operations of the drive. That's why when you rewind the video you don't see the grey pixeled screen again since that section has already been loaded into memory. I just copied the file to my SSD and it worked like a charm! No more "ugly" screens! I am not sure but I believe that an HDD of 7200 RPM should work as well. I hope this will help you all! Let me know!

[psyborgue]

Hey guys, I managed to fix this on my computer. First I unchecked the "Accelerated video output ( Overlay )" option in the Video Settings. I also unchecked the "Use hardware YUV -> RGB conversions". That really helped but still I got the grey pixeled screen, though less frequent. The next thing I did is to switch the graphics card to "High Performance". Now, this might not be the case in every laptop, but in this case my laptop has two graphic cards. The integrated one is made by Intel and it is supposed to increase battery life. The other card is an ATI ( quite powerful ) . So far it was almost perfect, I managed to get the grey pixeled screen once in a full movie. The last thing you want to try is to use a better drive. In my case, my laptop has an HDD 5400 RPM and an SSD. So it turns out that when I open the video files from the HDD I have the same issue, I believe that this happens due to the slow read operations of the drive. That's why when you rewind the video you don't see the grey pixeled screen again since that section has already been loaded into memory. I just copied the file to my SSD and it worked like a charm! No more "ugly" screens! I am not sure but I believe that an HDD of 7200 RPM should work as well. I hope this will help you all! Let me know!

I get the issue playing off a PCI-E SSD (~700MB/s read) on my MBP, so that didn't fix it for me, for what it's worth. Even a blu-ray remux is only going to be ~30-50mbit/sec. There shouldn't be a problem even on a very slow drive or even 100mbit ethernet. The GPU settings also don't seem to change anything as I tried that earlier. As far as disabling the overlay, that seems a rather drastic solution, considering CPU usage. Just curious, what's the CPU usage of VLC in activity monitor when the overlay is off? Running Fullscreen?

[matze142]

I get exactly this effect about 10 times a movie on a 2013 15" retina MBP and with the same frequency on my 2010 13" MBP that is connected to my TV in the living room. VLC version is 2.1.4 but the problem appeared some versions before this one, forgot which one exactly. CPU or Network load are not correlated at all, anyway on the retina MBP, there should be ample processing resources left. Like described by the others on this thread the problem is not in the file, the same scene plays OK after playing over it a second time. Proposed Fixes from psyborgue unfortunately had no noticeable effect. Guess you can always change the frequency of the problem by fiddling with other VLC parameters because this has an effect on playback timing. Any perceived improvement may be just coincidental - you are basically shifting the problem around a bit. To me this looks like an issue with dynamic buffering or incorrectly sync'ed multithreading, certainly difficult to debug because it is hard to reproduce. On the other hand I get it on virtually all files I play back eventually and the (mostly) grey screen could be recognised quite easily with a small helper routine to trap the problem and then look at e.g. the state of variables or buffers in a debugger.

Dear heroes from the VLC developer team please have look, it is quite annoying and its been around quite some time.
Thank you very much for the greatest player and all the work you put into it.
Best regards,

[psyborgue]

Proposed Fixes from psyborgue unfortunately had no noticeable effect.

Indeed. Only thing I can get it to do is have green garbage instead of grey when switching to HW decode, and I'm not willing to turn the overlay off. I remember back to before video overlays and those were very sad times indeed.

Dear heroes from the VLC developer team please have look, it is quite annoying and its been around quite some time.
Thank you very much for the greatest player and all the work you put into it.
Best regards,

Yes. Please fix this, as VLC is otherwise the greatest playe. If you don't have the hardware to reproduce the problem, I'll be happy to help test new builds.

[pentwaterzoo]

I don't understand why this also occurs with older versions. It used to not happen for me at all and now it happens no matter what version I install.

[themuge]

I also have this problem with VLC. Running 2.1.3 Rincewind on Windows 8. I don't have any solutions to this problem, but I do know that I can play the same files on the same computer, but with Windows media player, and there will be not one instance of the gray pixelated screen. This suggests that the problem has to do with something other than the file itself. I don't know anything about drives. But, as others already wrote, the problem's not the file. The problem is in VLC. Thank you VLC.

[Skez]

Sometimes this happens really often. Like twice every minute or something, and when it does (I normally play from an external hard drive), the hard drive spins like it wants to shoot out of its sockets. Could it be that it's playing from a USB-hard drive and playing from multiple .rar-files?

[rich8606]

I have two laptops and am currently having this same exact issue on both. My old laptop is i5, Win 7 64 bit and my new laptop is i7 Win 8.1 64 bit. Both laptops are running the same version of VLC, both have dual graphics cards (onboard Intel and integrated AMD/NVIDIA). My old laptop is set to always use the integrated ATI card, my new laptop switches graphics cards automatically, since it happens on either modes, I don't think its a graphics card issue. And the problem happens more often on my faster, new laptop, so I doubt it's a HDD transfer speed issue either. Never had the problem with older versions of VLC, so maybe a software issue?

[JMG-SUPPORT]

Same video problem. Videos worked fine in WIN XP. Just upgraded to WIN 8. Using latest version of VLC. I DO NOT have a problem when using other video players. For now, I am using Windows Media Player (yuck) because there is no pixelated gray screen issue.

VLC Seems to work a lot better when I remove the the check marks from the boxes under, TOOLS, PREFERENCES, VIDEO... but periodically there is a gray screen for a second or so.

Everyone, chant with me.... FIX IT, FIX IT, FIX IT....

[Lerianis]

I'm getting this issue as well, but ONLY on Windows Media 7,8,9 encoded files and .wmv files. Any other file, this issue does not exist on at all. It is dang strange because MPC-HC plays these files fine and dandy (including searching through the files) yet VLC Player for some reason 'barfs' (my own chosen term) on these files.
It absolutely only happens on WM 7,8,9 encoded files, H.264 encoded files play beautifully even streaming from a network location.

There has to be some sort of bug related to how VLC Player handles WM 7,8,9 encoded files. Unchecking overlay did not do anything other than upping my CPU usage. Checking hardware decode does nothing to solve the issue either.

[pepepopo]

I have the same issue. The problem is with VLC. A file that has issues on VLC plays perfectly on other media players on the same PC.

[dancri77]

I have the same issue when playing an RTSP stream from my camera. It worked well before.
When I play the same stream with FFPLAY it works without issues, so VLC must be the problem. I use version 2.1.3 x64.

[raphy002]

PREFERENCES --> Show Settings --> All
Input/Codecs --> [ADVANCED] File Caching
Default 300ms ; changed to 10000ms

WORKED FOR ME.

edit:
I also increased my *Disc caching* and *Network Caching*

[pepepopo]

PREFERENCES --> Show Settings --> All
Input/Codecs --> [ADVANCED] File Caching
Default 300ms ; changed to 10000ms

WORKED FOR ME.

edit:
I also increased my *Disc caching* and *Network Caching*

Well I'll be. I changed the setting to 10000 and don't see the pixelation so far. I didn't change anything else.

Thanks for that.

[Art Vandelay]

I just registered here to say a big

THANK YOU TO RAPHY002

because I am really annoyed by this VLC problem since months and I already tried different players but I like VLC. Without that tipp I would have to get used to another player. And I have this problem on different machines.

At first I tested with caching values of 100ms ==> A lot of more of this sticky grey screens. That proofs that root cause of the problem is in these settings.

Then I changed all caching values to 3000ms ==> Everything is OK now!

VLC should really think about increasing their standard values because it is frustrating a lot of users.