The fact that VLC Media Player won’t play videos It can end up becoming a serious problem. We are talking about the best media file player available on various operating systems. But even the best software can sometimes fail. Luckily, there are ways to fix most issues related to this issue.
VLC Media Player won’t play videos
Check file format
While VLC supports most popular video formats, it doesn’t support all of them either. In case of trying to play a video that is not compatible with VLC, it will show us a black screen or an error message.
We recommend visiting the official Web VLC Media Player for all the formats it supports. In case the format is not supported, we always have the possibility to use an online converter.
Disable hardware acceleration
VLC has hardware acceleration that helps improve encoding and decoding of some types of videos. Although on some occasions it can generate compatibility problems, especially in those that have defective hardware.
We will switch to the Input / Codecs tab.
In this section, we will click on the drop-down arrow next to Hardware accelerated decoding and we will choose the option that says Disable. We press Save and verify if it plays the video.
Use DirectX (DirectDraw) as video output
By default, VLC has OpenGL video output mode. Although sometimes this mode cannot play some types of videos, so it would be better to change the output mode.
We achieve this from the Preferences window and then in the Videos tab.
We click on the drop-down menu next to Output and choose the DirectX (DirectDraw) output mode.
Click the Accelerated Video Output (Overlay) and Hardware YUV > RGB Conversions checkbox. Then we click on save.
Reset VLC Preferences
In case all the previous solutions did not work, the only option left for us is to reset the player to factory settings.
We can achieve this in an extremely simple way, we are going to have to go to the Preferences window and then we will click on Reset preferences at the bottom. We confirm our selection by clicking OK and that’s it.
