So last night I come stumbling home and try to watch a movie on my computer... Doesn't work. I woke up today and none of my videos will work. This includes everything from pirated movies to porn. I downloaded a couple of the major codec packs out there but to no avail. When I hope a movie file it says playing but the progress bar does not move and the screen remains black the entire time. Streaming video on the internet works, however. Anyone have any ideas?

What players are having the problem? All? Just windows media? When you say streaming video works, is is playing off a flash based player (ala YouTube) or Windows Media Player?

For some reason that problem sounds very, very familiar to me, like I experienced it once in the past. It must have been a very long time ago, because I don't remember how I resolved the problem.

Verify if its just one player or all players (Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime, WinAmp, etc).

If it is only Windows Media Player, un-install and re-install it.

Also, make sure you try opening different types of video files: WMV, AVI, MPG and so on.

Download VLC Media Player, it is awesome and can open just about anything. Lets see if that works for you.

Real Player, Windows Media Player, BS Player all do not work. It appears to be all players.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ Try it

Very weird. It worked. Still don't know why my other players assed out though.

Well... I would still recommend re-installing Windows Media. It could be that there is a shared file that was removed when something was un-installed that those programs are looking for.