Black Thumbnails on .AVI files (XVID compression)

[$lamscaper]

Hey guys, sorry in advance if this has been covered before but I'm brand new to this site. Seems like the right place to ask this question.

Anyway, I recently started transcoding my DVD collection using AutoGK (along with virtualDub to fix audio sync issues) so I can store more movies on my desktop hdd without eating up too much space. I also want to burn a few VCD's as well in the near future.

I've been using XVID for video compression and the results are better than I expected. I'm very happy with the quality though I've only been encoding in one pass. For audio I'm using MP3 CBR 128 kbps and it's also very acceptable. Like I said, I do have audio sync issues with almost every movie I convert but by playing around with virtualDub I was able to fix every one so far so it's really a non-issue.

I'm outputting the video and audio into a single .avi file. My only problem is that for whatever reason every single thumbnail that's generated in explorer is black. Looking at a folder full of black thumbnails is not something I like doing and this problem seems to be very persistent. I've read that Nero could be the culprit (I have Nero 8 Ultra installed) and I did unregister NeMP4Splitter.ax in hopes of fixing my issue but it remains nonetheless. I have installed the K-Lite mega-codec pack as well so I'm not sure if something there is causing this or not. I've disabled/uninstalled pretty much everything in the Nero suite except for Nero burning Rom and Nero Recode being that those are the only programs I actually use in it.

Any help will be appreciated.

[filmboss80]

Do a search on this site for "codec pack" and see what shows up. As you will see, codec packs cause a whole lot of headaches. Whether it is the exact culprit in your case, it's hard to say; but it is bloody likely.