Hi all,

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.

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!

Please, any help would be wonderful!

No ideas? this is really annoying me. Maybe the Guru3D forum members would me more knowledgeable on this...

There is something in windows that can be updated or disabled that is responsible for making those thumbnails.... I just don't know what it's called. If they're a special format like divx or xvid, try updating those.

So what do you mean "black thumbnails"?