Windows 10: video thumbnails not showing on Windows 11

I've tried every fixes mentioned but nothing worked. It only happned a few days ago.

:)

 

Video thumbnails are not showing

I built a new computer back in April last year and had Windows 11 installed on it. Everything was working fine except for the fact that for some reason the system would not show any thumbnail previews of any of my video files. That includes MP4s, MKVs, or even older formats like mpg or avi. What's strange though is that this only happens for video files that are saved on my secondary storage drive (my d: drive). If the video files are saved on my C: drive or my network drive, the video thumbnails will display no problem. Pictures files will display their thumbnail previews as well regardless of which volume they are saved on.

I tried clearing the thumbnail cache in disk cleanup but that had no effect. I also noticed that there is no listing for thumbnail cache for the D: volume. I tried toggling the option to always display icons and not thumbnails but that didn't work either. My default media player is VLC and I have been keeping that up to date. Also tried changing the default media player back to the system default or any of the other ones available.

I did a full chkdsk of the D: drive but no errors have been found. Also did all of the standard driver and BIOS updates for my hardware.

As a test I installed another hard drive into the computer and copied some video files over to that one. That drive is able to display the video thumbnails with no problem. It is something with this specific drive that is not allowing the thumbnails to display.

This problem has always existed on this computer so it has never worked properly at all. My D: drive is a WD Black 6TB HDD. Formatted with NTFS and is currently only using less than 10% of the available storage. No RAID or encryption is setup on this disk. Any thoughts on this? I have searched everywhere for answers but this seems to be a very unique problem to me.

OH version: Windows 11 Home 22H2

 

can i show Photos BUT NOT videos on windows 11 file explore thumbnail

Since updated from Windows 10 to 11, if i have 1 JPG and 1 MP4 file in each folder, and when i preview my file folders on File Explorer, it shows a thumbnail of the video but not photo. Can I change in the other way around (ie. show thumbnail of photo, BUT NOT videos) on the thumbnail?

 

Video thumbnails not showing up in Windows Explorer.

So I've been having this problem for several months now..

One day some of my video thumbnails weren't showing, so I deleted the thumbnail cache, and then they were all gone and never returned. It was like Windows lost the ability to create thumbnails for videos, and as I moved videos around over time windows never generated new thumbnails for them.

I have photo thumbnails, but not video thumbnails, and video thumbnails don't show up in other programs either, such as Media Player, or in alternatives to Windows Explorer, such as One Commander. It's like Windows has lost the ability to create video thumbnails. And only video thumbnails.

I also don't get any video previews in Windows Explorer's Preview Pane; but again I do get previews for photos and other files, PDF, etc.

And it's the same on all 4 of my hard drives, so it's not drive specific.

I have tried a lot of stuff such as:

• Deleting the thumbnail cache.
  
• SFC.
  
• DISM.
  
• Edit Group Policy.
  
• Explorer>Options>View>Always display icons, never thumbnails (checked and unchecked)
  
• Resetting Media Player settings (in case that interfered with it).
  
• Rebuilt the search index.
  
• Searched REGEDIT for "thumbs", but nothing stood out.
  
• Deleted temporary files.
  
• Virus and malware scans.
  

And I've probably tried various other stuff too that I've forgotten about.

Is there anything else I can check?

How exactly does Windows build thumbnails, is there some code, or a .dll file somewhere? Or is there some codec or media player feature that grabs a snapshot of the file or something?

Does Windows handle video and photo thumbnails differently?

I also don't have any thumbs.db files, anywhere (is this even still a thing?), even in folders with photos and thumbnails in them, even though I have turned on the option to show protected operating system files and hidden files.

Anybody know what's going on here?