VLC pixelated gray screen

[thesandvolcano]

@thesandvolcano - I tested RAMdisk and for me at least, you're dead right, it's a disk power management issue. I made the change to the registry as per your instructions and the ACHI - Link Power Management - HIPM/DIPM option appeared in the Power Options / Advanced Options screen. I was expecting to be able to disable it (as I thought that if this was the problem, that's what I should do - perhaps I misunderstood you?), but that option wasn't available. So instead, I chose "Active" and voila, the video is running smoothly again....at least for now. I've no idea if this is the opposite of what you were recommending, but thanks either way.

You have done it correctly. Whilst it may seem counter intuitive to my original description, setting AHCI LPM to "active" effectively disables HIPM & DIPM.

[PaddyP69]

Dammit - "at least for now" turned out to be prophetic. The file I tested 5 times worked fine at the time now exhibits the same problems, as do others. Any other ideas? What I really miss is the keyboard shortcuts and have installed the "wmpkeys" plugin. It's basic and you can't assign the space bar as the pause button, but it'll do as a workaround for now. https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19356/a ... ia-player/

[thesandvolcano]

Dammit - "at least for now" turned out to be prophetic. The file I tested 5 times worked fine at the time now exhibits the same problems, as do others. Any other ideas? What I really miss is the keyboard shortcuts and have installed the "wmpkeys" plugin. It's basic and you can't assign the space bar as the pause button, but it'll do as a workaround for now. https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19356/a ... ia-player/

Open Resource Monitor, select the "Disk" tab, sort on "Total B/sec" and keep it in front of you. The next time the issue occurs you should check for a competing process that maybe reading/writing to the same disk. I'm still using VLC 2.2.4 Weatherwax by the way.

[OpalEcho]

Resurrecting this old thread to add a possible fix for this common problem:

I recently had this issue with a bunch of files I had just encoded. My vlc player rarely had problems with playback before so I googled the symptom and this thread came up. Increasing the disk cache as described by bunnykhatana is one way to remedy the issue, but it doesn't get to the heart of why some files play fine while others won't.

It turns out my files that were specifically causing the issue had encoded with only 1 reference frame. After some googling I found that most h264 profiles should be set to 3. iTunes has a default of 4 for its 1080p downloads. I went back and re-encoded them, this time specifying a reference frame setting of 4, and from the looks of it vlc no longer stutters like it used to.

If anyone still experiences this problem, download Mediainfo and analyse the metadata of the file that's having trouble playing smoothly. Does it have more than 1 reference frame? Is the profile level 4 and above? Is the profile baseline, main or high? It could be that the file itself is causing the issue due to how its encoded.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Topic is totally non-sensical. Closing.