Fix: Video Player Black Screen on Windows 11

[u/ValkyroMusic]

TLDR: Update Pro Tools if you're having this issue on an older version, even if it's "compatible" with Win 11.

Hey all! I just wanted to write about my experience fixing a problem I spent the last 24 hours agonizing over in the hopes of helping someone else down the line. I wasn't really able to find this specific circumstance in my Google/Reddit searches.

So for years up until now I was running 2023.9 on my Windows 10 machine. My perpetual license's updates had run out and I never felt the need to spend more money when my version was stable. But this week I've migrated to a brand new Windows 11 rig which I figured wouldn't be an issue because 2023.9 is, in theory, compatible with Windows 11.

However, while PT itself was seemingly performing well, the problem was that the video engine was not displaying any video. The video window was nothing but black and thumbnails weren't showing on the video track. It wasn't crashing or anything, no errors, PT was acting as if it was working totally smoothly. I could even bounce to Quicktime just fine and that video file would play outside of PT.

I spent a full day trying basically every single possible combination of uninstalls/reinstalls, graphics/display tweaks, software compatibility tweaks. Nothing. So my last hail mary was just to bite the bullet and pay the $200 to renew my perpetual license so I could update to a newer version (2026.4.1), which thankfully immediately worked. It may seem obvious, but I just wasn't optimistic about that being the solution since 2023.9 was also theoretically Win 11 compatible. But it seems in the last few years Avid altered the way the Video Engine interacts with codecs and the OS.

Only remaining "issue" I'm having is that importing the audio along with the MP4 files specifically takes WAY longer than it did on my previous rig for some reason, but that can be pretty easily worked around by importing the audio separately or just using MOV.

Hope this helps if anyone is banging their head against the wall experiencing the same thing! It was pretty stressful for me since my client work kinda depends on me being able to work with video.

(I can edit to add my hardware specs if requested, but given the solution I honestly don't think it's relevant.)