I don't think hardware because VLC ran without problems for years on this board. I've always had troubles with win10 on this board, this machine, and I've done three complete new installs on new hard drives because of that over the last two years.
But through them all, right up to now, VLC has run okay.
I'm going to install an old version of VLC if I can find one and see if that helps.
The other thing would be Win10 upgrades but if it were that there'd be thousands of people getting it wouldn't there?
Our own software is a possible I guess. It'd just about have to be software that's running at the time I suppose, rather than any of the total installed software?
Usually I have heaps of installed stuff. But not this time because I've just put up this new install of win10, as I'm saying. I"ve got very little as yet.
And then again - how about the past ? I've always run this suite of software, always, got nothing new right now that I'm aware of.
There should be a VLC error log file somewhere shouldn't there?
Edit later:
Well I just tried installing version 3.0.5 64bit from the .msi and I got a failed install on errr 2753 which they say may indicate a bad install package. I'm using files from https://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/3.0.5/win64/
Another edit: I tried 2.2.4 and 2.2.2 and they seemed perhaps to run alright but the video brightness control wouldn't work and I need it on this old monitor I've got so they're no good.
I suspect this version of win10 has broken things. I'm going to use MPC. Until someone comes up with an answer for me.