VLC in Vista

Since I discovered it last year, VLC Media Player has been my video player of choice in both Windows and Ubuntu. Why?

Pretty much one reason -- It plays anything I throw at it.

Where WMP strapped to the gills with codecs fails, VLC reigns supreme. The only videos I've ever had it struggle with had other problems such as file corruption.

So I was quite surprised when I got things set up in Vista and VLC suddenly wouldn't play my videos anymore. Audio would work and all seemed well, but just no video output. After a little googling, I discovered the culprit seems to be Vista's new Aero glass interface and the modules VLC is using to output the video. Here's how to get VLC up and playing again in Vista.

1. Open VLC and go to Settings-->Preferences (or just hit ctrl-S)
2. In the left pane, navigate to Video-->Output Modules
3. Select the "Advanced Options" check box which will allow you to modify the output module. Yours is probably currently set to "Default"
4. Change this to Windows GDI Video Output or OpenGL Output. (Other settings may work for your as well)
5. Restart VLC
6. Enjoy your working video!

Hopefully this problem will be fixed in a future version of VLC, but until then I hope this fix is helpful!