Video and Windows 7? - Resolved, I think.

freakish light

Ok, so I've had Windows 7 for a couple of weeks now, everything's been rolling smoothly, had no major conflicts. Until tonight.

I'm in the middle of a DVD and it just shuts down all of a sudden (it may have been a read error). I go to open it back up in Windows Media Player and as soon as I load it, it crashes. Weird... let's go to VLC. Instant crash. Umm.... Media Player Classic. Crash.

I try a different DVD. Crash. I try a movie file I have saved on my PC. Crash. I restart the computer and try again. Crash.

Well shit. What do I do now? It's not giving me a debug report when it crashes, it just says it's stopped working and that Windows doesn't have a solution.

ArcticMonkey

Reinstall video card drivers in case they became corrupted.

If that don't work try changing video output in VLC.
Start with GDI (non accelerated windows output). If that crashes the error is in the video decoding and you should reinstall any codec pack you have, or try installing one. There is a ffdshow for dummies variant called cccp or something similar I'd try.

If GDI works try the other ones and see which ones crash.

Edit: If you dual boot, is the error only in Win 7?

freakish light

Good ideas, I'll be sure to try that. No I don't dual boot, I suspect the problem lies somewhere in a low-level driver. I haven't tried any games either, they might be messed up as well.

Thanks for the input. I'll get back with the results.

Ego

OK, you almost certainly have but I'll ask anyhow, have you tried rebooting?

And after you try that and it doesn't work, I'd update your chipset drivers for your motherboard (especially if you have an nVidia motherboard.) But from the sounds of it, things were working fine for DVD playback and have now become completely borked?

freakish light

Yeah, I restarted. Once a soft reset and once a hard reset just in case there were weird settings left over.

I don't think it's a motherboard problem, but some kind of low level graphics thing that got corrupted when it suddenly wasn't able to read from the disc anymore (there must have been a read error it couldn't have recovered from).

I reinstalled my graphics drivers and it didn't do anything, but when I switched my video output in VLC from Default to GDI like Arctic suggested it actually started to play.

Also I can't seem to run games, Fallout 3 crashed as soon as the launcher came up, and Left 4 Dead goes to a black screen like it's starting and then just goes back to the desktop. It's gotta be a corrupted driver in there somewhere.

freakish light

Since it seems something to do with low-level system drivers I'm going to do a repair install of Windows 7. It's not DirectX or OpenGL because VLC played them fine rendering that way, but for some reason Default crashes every time.

Hope this works.


edit: Turns out all I needed was a system restore one or two steps back. It seems to be working now. Thanks for helping narrow down the problem.