VLC Media Player Won't Play m4v files in Win 7 64-bit

[BassPig]

I've got a problem that's been evading solutions. Since moving to Windows 7 64-bit, I find that VLC Media Player won't play full HD video files that I rendered in Adobe Premiere/Media Encoder. It will only play m2v files in SD, but not m4V files in 1080P. Instead of playback, the player appears to begin play, window client area expands to 1920x1080, but remains black. However, the HDD light comes on and stays on. A look in Windows 7 Resource Manager, Disk tab, reveals that VLC is WRITING approximately 128,000,000 B/sec for the duration of the 'playback'. It is almost as if it is redirecting playback to the HDD, but I know of no such setting in VLC to cause that. It does this for a few minutes for a 45-minute video and then stops.
Is there a configuration that I am overlooking that may be causing HD videos to be treated as 'write to disc' instead of to screen? It's only affecting HD videos. All SD stuff plays in the player normally.

EDIT: Windows Media Player will play the file, but with pauses every 2 seconds, not a smooth playback. VLC Media Player worked great under XP, but I'm not having any luck with it under Win 7 64-bit.

EDIT 2: I just installed VLC x64 (experimental version). Same result. BTW, this situation exists across BOTH of my Win 7 64 machines. I have two PCs, both with Win 7 64-bit and neither of them will play a .m4v file in VLC Media Player. However, Windows Media Player does play these files, and if I install my old XP boot drive and play these files on VLC Media Player that's install in XP, they play beautifully and smoothly.

My suspicion is that Win 7 is missing something necessary to the support of playback of m4v on VLC, but I don't know what that may be.


EDIT: I've pretty much separated the problem videos and the okay videos into two categories: MPEG2 and h.264. Apparently VLC isn't producing any screen output when the file format is h.264.
Oddly, QuickTime 7 can't play the files either. But Windows Media Player can. This situation is exclusive to Windows 7 machines. Our Windows XP machines are not experiencing any playback problems with VLC and h.264 files.

[BassPig]

I think you need to remove m4v drm protection. M4V was created with protected drm, if you want to play on non-apple device, you need to remove the drm first. I just know --removed possible spam-- can do this, you can try


To my knowledge, Adobe Media Encoder does not put DRM on any of it's HD renders. Even more odd, is that when the Blu-ray master is rendered with Adobe Encore, the Stream files DO play in VLC Media Player. But the rendered source .m4v files rendered from Adobe Premiere's Media Encoder do not. As far as I know, Adobe has no capability to render DRM protected streams.

[foxyshadis]

Wow, spam after 2 years. Looks like he was just trying to drum up sales.

My guess is that VLC is trying to restream the raw file to a temporary mp4 when it lights up the hard drive like a Christmas tree, probably because it can't handle the lack of indices. That's only a guess though. Does it still happen? I know I can play all kinds of raw files with MPC-HC (or -BE coupled with LAV filters), so that's something to consider instead.

[BassPig]

Wow, spam after 2 years. Looks like he was just trying to drum up sales.

My guess is that VLC is trying to restream the raw file to a temporary mp4 when it lights up the hard drive like a Christmas tree, probably because it can't handle the lack of indices. That's only a guess though. Does it still happen? I know I can play all kinds of raw files with MPC-HC (or -BE coupled with LAV filters), so that's something to consider instead.

Took me a moment to figure out that spam comment. LOL..

Funny coincidence that this thread came to life just a few days after I upgraded to Premiere CS6 and did an export and noticed the black screen in VLC when I tried to check the encode quality by viewing it. I actually posted about the problem on the Adobe forums two nights ago, so when I got the e-mail notification, I was a bit confused why it was THIS forum and not Adobe's. I downloaded the current version of VLC, too, thinking that maybe I had an old version. Didn't notice anything strange going on, just the black screen and no shuttle controls.