No Video, Audio Only Fix for Miro
I use Miro (http://www.getmiro.com) pretty much every day to download and watch media. Today on my Windows box, however, it decided to no longer play back video. The audio played just fine but I only got a blank screen for video. I did some extensive googling, all of which turned up the same thing, a fix that could be applied by installing VLC (the media player Miro uses), tweaking the video settings, then copying a certain file to a certain directory and restarting Miro. Unfortunately, everyone that posted about this fix linked to some Miro documentation that no longer existed for the specifics. After a bunch of trial and error, I finally figured out where everything needed to go for the fix. Please note, these instructions are based on a “standard” Windows XP setup in which the system drive is C and your profile is stored in C:\Documents and Settings… in other words ymmv.
- Install the latest VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc)
- Open one of Miro videos using VLC.
- Go to Tools > Preferences > Video and change the settings until your video actually displays correctly (note: you will need to restart VLC between each change to notice any effects, the most common setting that causes problems is “Accelerated Video Output” being enabled.)
- Once you have your video displaying correctly in VLC, go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Application Data\vlc and copy the vlcrc file
- Open C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Application Data\PCF-VLC and paste the working vlcrc file here.
- Make sure Miro is closed, launch a fresh copy of Miro and voila! Video should now output properly.
Also, I’d like to say to the people that make Miro, I love your product and think you are doing a great job. The documentation on your site, however, is hard to use and sorely lacking. Perhaps you should consider implementing a more traditional wiki for issues such as this and keeping an archive in place so links to common fixes don’t go bad in the future.