Video screen goes dark.

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Two times in the past month I have had the video screen go dark when playing a video – I believe this has happened with both YouTube and Venmo.  I both cases the audio keeps chugging right along and play timer keeps counting.

Rebooting the system gets things back to normal.

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Have you checked for an updated video driver on the manufacturer’s website?

cheers, Paul

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I came across something similar after I switched from an AMD back to an NVIDIA card after many years. Thankfully, in my case the solution was easy enough though I had never encountered it with previous NVIDIA cards.
If you have an NVIDIA Card you’ll want to open the ‘NVIDIA Control Panel’ > Goto ‘Display’ > Goto ‘Adjust Desktop Color Settings’ > Look down for ‘Content type reported to the display’ and switch it from ‘Auto’ to ‘Desktop programs’

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My system is a pedestrian Dell, it is not a gaming computer. All the cards are what it left the Dell factory with when I bought it.

Stationary images in both jpg’s and pictures embedded in web pages display properly when this happens. Just the video images go black.

Rebooting the system clears it up.

To me – it acts like some ‘check register’ in the system has become corrupted.  Rebooting resets all the registers to their nominal values.

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Having hardware acceleration enabled can cause this exact symptom. In fact, my SeaMonkey browser (a Firefox ESR derivative) encountered the exact same “sound but no video” problem you mentioned in your first post until I turned it off!

Here’s how to do that.

• Right-click an empty spot on your Desktop and choose Display settings.
• Scroll to the bottom of the right-hand “Display” section and select Graphics settings.
• Turn off Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.
• Reboot your PC for the change to take effect.

Note: Browsers also have a hardware acceleration setting that can cause the same problem when viewing videos but it’s normally labeled as “use hardware acceleration if available” so turning it off for the PC will prevent them from using it without having to figure out how to turn it off for each different browser.

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@OP, a browser disclosure or whatever is being used to view the videos in the initial post may help pin down the issue.

Keeping IT Lean, Clean and Mean!

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Microfix wrote:

@OP, a browser disclosure or whatever is being used to view the videos in the initial post may help pin down the issue.

Chrome is the browser.

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Think I might have observed what is happening. Browser was working fine as I was descending into the Facebook rabbit hole. Had been descending for a period of time and the entire screen went black for a second or two and then came back to ‘normal’ – normal EXCEPT that all the Facebook elements that had videos as a part of their screen went black as soon as one scrolled into them.

Then I noticed that the ‘Update’ notification for Chrome had been turned on in the browser. Once I went through the update browser procedure and ‘attacked’ the rabbit hole again – everything worked as intended.

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