Film "stills" icon replaced by VLC icon

[Warby35]

For example when i open my movie folder and i go inside where i have videos stored, the thumbnail for 4 or 5 of the videos are show with the vlc media player icon, which is the orange with white stripes cone,rest are movie stills with the small vlc icon in the bottom corner Is there a way to change this, so that i can see an actual "still" thumbnail of all the video files? this all happened after i moved all my video files to my external HDD,(or maybe after installing Nero The first 40 show "stills" thumbnails and then i installed Nero 8 and now i get the orange and white cone, so i uninstalled nero , reinstalled it but unchecked all video recognition files and the first transfare after that was a "stlls" thumbnail, hurray... -*- but after that its gone to the thumbnail kind of icon (1 piece of blank film with the vlc logo in the corner) but its a black still and i know the opening frames of these films are not black!
I have uninstalled vlc, uninstalled nero, cleaned reg. then installed nero without any video recognition, then installed vlc and back to -*-
Sorry for the long winded expo but its starting to get to me, every movie i put into the folder now (or anywhere) is seen as a black movie still with the vlc logo in the corner.

Some of the files, eg avi are represented with a film still and some avi files are reresented with a cone or a blank film still, so its not a case of some files will use the cone and other files will use the film still.
The exact same is happening now with WMP?

WHAT IS GOING ON!! HELP ME PLEASE,

Thanks, Mark

[Arite]

The video thumbnails are created using DirectShow video codecs - i.e. if Windows Media Player can play it then you should get video thumbnails. VLC media player uses it's own codecs and plugins and so videos that may(/may not) play with VLC may not(/may) play with Windows Media Player. In order to display the video thumbnails for a certain video the DirectShow codec for that video codec would need to be installed. Nero comes packages with some DirectShow codecs hence why installing it allows more video thumbnails to be displayed.

As for the blank/black video thumbnails - try deleting "Thumb.db" (a hidden file) that should be in the same directory/folder as the videos so that the thumbnails can be recreated.

Arite.

[MoabUtah]

Has anyone resolved this?

I have three .mkv episodes of a tv series that show in explorer as mini Film Stills and a further two episodes that appear as the vlc 'cone'. For all intents and purposes the five episodes are the same size [roughly] and contain the same tags and data. All were created the same so I am at loss as to get them all the same.

It doesn't matter that they appear different but it's more of trying to understand why the icons appear different.

[MoabUtah]

Okay ... found the answer.

Movies etc encoded as H265 (HEVC) will display as a cone, while H264 will show as a Film Still icon.
Simple when you know how.

I suspect many could have answered this but chose not to. Thanks.