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Sound but only a black screen with mp4 files in Quicktime

zhenya

zhenya

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jan 6, 2005
6,932
3,681
2015 retina MacBook with macOS Sierra 10.12.1 installed. Since upgrading to Sierra I get a black screen when playing back mp4 videos. Sound plays back, if I load the clips I can see those, and sometimes with enough fussing I can get it to actually play the video. Playback in VLC works fine, but it uses 3x as much power so I'd like to figure out what's going on.

Thanks.
 
If it plays in VLC but not in Quicktime Player, the video was encoded with a codec that isn't supported by Quicktime. You have two choices:
1) continue to use VLC to watch those videos
2) transcode to something new and modern, like H.264 or H.265 (I used to use Handbrake, but now I use iVI)
 
It's weird because these videos are from a source that have played fine for years. Perhaps they changed something in how they encode them recently. It's just weird that they will play sometimes if I futz around with it a bunch - especially if I play around with the Airplay settings.

@MacUser2525 it says the link is missing when I click download that file.
 
Damn happens sometimes, just tried to upload my copy here but it says 115kb is too large for an attachment which I find hard to believe. If you want you can PM me email address and I will send the .zip file of it I created to attach here.
 
I want to bump this thread, as I am having the exact same problem as OP. I am trying to play mp4 videos from a source I have been using for a couple years with no issues, but now only see a black screen with correct audio. I can't say for sure if the problem started after an OS update.

When I play with VLC, it plays fine. When I Airplay to my 4th generation Apple TV from Quicktime, it plays fine on the TV. If I play the little thumbnail preview in Finder, it works fine. I have a touchbar MacBook Pro, and the scrubbing bar in the touchbar displays the frames just fine. Now I just noticed when I turned Airplay off in the middle of playback, it continued on my computer just fine, but when I skipped back to the beginning it stopped playing video again.

The videos are already encoded in h.264, so not sure what I can do there. Any ideas?
 
I continue to have the same issue even after updating to High Sierra. Same as @djon41 above - if I trigger an Airplay session first, the video then plays as normal in Quicktime. Otherwise sound only with a black screen.

Frustrating because VLC uses twice the battery!
 
zhenya said:
I continue to have the same issue even after updating to High Sierra. Same as @djon41 above - if I trigger an Airplay session first, the video then plays as normal in Quicktime. Otherwise sound only with a black screen.

Frustrating because VLC uses twice the battery!
Click to expand...

Yep, I'm still having this issue as of yesterday, even after updating to High Sierra. FYI you might try the IINA video player as an alternative to VLC. Not sure how its battery usage is, but it's gotten pretty popular recently.
 
The way to fix this is install Perian. It's a codec pack of sorts. Works 100%.
I was caught out on this too when i upgraded to Mojave.
I had this before when I was running Yosemite, but forgot about it when I did a clean install of Mojave.
Hope this helps someone.
 
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