Videos showing as black thumbnails in Windows?

Cody-7

Hi guys...

I've been having an issue with black thumbnails being generated for some of my videos, but it's starting to get a bit worse. The problem is for like 90% of my videos - especially DivX AVI files, it generates a black thumbnail for the preview in Windows XP... makes it quite annoying when trying to see which video i want to open.

Now, I realize that this is usually because a lot of videos start out as black and fade in, and because XP only looks at the first frame and it's usually black. BUT - I opened up many of my videos that were showing up as black, and found that often times the first frame is indeed not blank.

So, to solve the problem I did some googling. A couple websites where people were having a similar issue with Media Center were told to delete the thumbs.db file and regenerate the thumbnails. That didn't work for me. Another suggested to delete thumbs.db and turn off thumbnail caching. That didn't work either - as a matter of fact, once I refreshed the thumbnails after this, some of my DivX AVIs that weren't black before are now showing up as black!

Do you guys have any ideas? Besides the DivX 6.7 codec, I have no other 3rd party codecs installed. I uninstalled XviD to see if that would help, but it didn't. Maybe if you guys could tell me 1) How to fix the black thumbnails for files tat don't start as black, and 2) Tell me how to make it like Vista where it looks a couple seconds into the video so it avoids a black preview.

- Thanks!

Animatrix · 08-28-2008, 01:15 | posts: 6,852 | Location: Denmark

1. Nero 8 issue
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=730187

2. Try un-registering and re-registering shmedia.dll

Start > Run > Type regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll > Type regsvr32 shmedia.dll

Google does have quite a few hits on this (as i know you know)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...ls+files+in+XP

Cody-7 · 08-31-2008, 21:39 | posts: 64 | Location: Colorado, USA

Thanks for the help, Animatrix.

I tried re-registering shmedia.dll with no luck. But, I searched the DivX forums in search of answers and found this thread: http://forums.divx.com/forum/viewTopic.php?id=3134 . In that thread someone was having a seemingly different problem where he was unable to play AVI files. It was suggested to uncheck the 'Use Advanced Hardware Overlay' option in the DivX Playback Configuration window. After doing that and re-generating my thumbnails, low and behold the DivX files now show the proper preview and no longer just show black! Hopefully anyone having a similar problem will find the thread and try this too.