After updating Plex for Windows app to 1.42.1 with every media I try to play i get black screen and I can only hear audio. I tried media with different codecs and from different servers. Even free movies provided by Plex have the same issue.
I if uninstall Plex and reinstall the older version (Plex-1.41.0.2876-e960c9ca-x86_64) everything works fine but after a reboot it automatically updates to 1.42.1 and there goes the black screen again.
Player (Win10) - 1.42.1.2926-415b0e14
Server - 1.25.8.5663
Am also seeing this issue
Even worse for me though is on top of this additionally now I can’t play anything at all, regardless of file format, transcoding, direct play, nothing works. All it does it play audio and show black video. Plays fine elsewhere (android, web etc). Fully reinstalled, including deleting folder out of appdata, no joy.
Apologies don’t mean to hijack slightly, but its happened since this update.
Are you using Windows desktop scaling? If so, try what my screenshot above illustrates and disable the scaling for Plex alone.
Do also create a mpv.conf file and put --gpu-context=d3d11
into it on a separate line.
If you already have a mpv.conf in place, simply add the line to it, preferably at the top.
It’s located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Plex
Have you played with the “Video Playback Quality” setting under
Settings - ‘Show Advanced’ - Plex for Windows - Player
?
As well as the “Hardware Decoding” toggle on the same page?
Also experiencing this issue with 1.42.1. Audio works fine but black screen for video no matter which file is played. Windows 11 Home with NVIDIA GeForce 3090 and all the latest system and driver updates, as well as all updates to Plex Media Server. Works fine on all my other devices, as well as with Plex Media Player for HTPCs, OpenPHT, and Plex Web. 1.40.1 sort of works but experiences random lockups and freezes on certain content. I fail to understand how this serious an issue could have escaped testing. From searching around, I found that if you add disableUpdater=true just under the [debug] header of the plex.ini in your local appdata folder, you can prevent the player from automatically updating from 1.40.1. Perhaps this will be of use to someone until this matter is resolved.
I tried everything mentioned in this thread and ended up reverting and using disableUpdater=true in debug for the time being. And its not like its isolated to a specific OS or GPU either. I am on a Windows 10 machine with a GeForce 1080 remote streaming. Never had any issues until this update. Same exact client settings on my Laptop, yet it works just fine after the update. I hope a fix comes out soon for this.
Not sure what’s causing it, maybe it’s something to do with nVidia, since it seems a lot here have nVidia cards (I’m using a 2080 on my laptop). I have also updated to the latest drivers, but that did not fix the issue.
Would someone mind posting a link to download the most recent version prior to 1.42.1.2926? My cache directory only has the offending version, and the next most recent download I can find is for a 1.40.x version.
Just adding that I am experiencing the issue as well in Windows 11.
Reinstalling the older version from %localappdata% and preventing auto-updates was successful for me. I am hoping to see a proper resolution soon.
Just a heads up, this is still not fixed as of Version 1.43.2.2949-1048d686. The old Media Player for HTPCs from 2020 works fine, as does the web player. Might I suggest you conveniently reassign whoever is working on your Player for Windows? Because I don’t think this relationship is going to work out.
