[THRobinson]

Thanks... hoping so. Hate replacing stuff that works.

If it was the card, I'd be ok with it if my old one fit my nephews PC. It's better than what he has for games, but, 1/2" too long to fit in his DELL. Got my old 500w PSU in it (replaced his 200w) but sadly card wouldn't fit. Otherwise, I'd get another card and upgrade his, but in this instance, the card would go to waste.

Anyways... I'll give that a shot when I get home and see how it works.

I watched a movie with v16.1 (before I backdated it again) and at least this time it didn't have the top go askew. When I tried v16.0 before, I watched a movie and the top 1/4 shifted over a few pixels. Hopefully that issue was corrected. I think the consensus was to blame NVidia drivers for that at the time.

[THRobinson]

Hopefully got the correct Driver Sweeper. Found a few apps by that name, one scanned the system, cleaned and made a bit of a mess of the video, so found the driver sweeper by Guru3D for the video card, rebooted to safe mode and ran that.

Once back into Windows, I ran SFC /SCANNOW with no issues.

Ran the custom install for my nvidia card, I only install what's needed so none of the 3D Vision stuff or the Geforce Experience. Clicked clean install as well. Reboot.

Not sure how to reinstall DirectX though, ran dxdiag and it verified something. Then went to the DirectX download page at Microsoft, downloaded and ran that. Said installed ok.

Upgraded to Kodi 16.1, added the icon to my startup folder, rebooted the computer and... works.

Of course, I'd like to make sure not a fluke so, another reboot... and black screen again.

Added "-d 15" for a 15sec delay to see how that works, black screen. Tried 30sec, same deal.

Disabled EventGhost and MSE Antivirus, left the 30sec delay, reboot... black.

It did work once though, and I think if I recall when I tried with Kodi 16.0 it had a few random successes... so it 'can' do it... just mostly won't.

[zerocool_ie]

I was getting the black screen at startup also, on two older DELL laptops (Intel GPU on Win 8.1 & AMD Radeon Mobility HD 3650 on Win 10).

I made an autoexec.py (wiki) with the following contents:

Code:

import xbmc
xbmc.executebuiltin('XBMC.Action(togglefullscreen)')
xbmc.executebuiltin('XBMC.Action(togglefullscreen)')

This makes Kodi go windowed, then fullscreen and it seems to have solved the issue for me.
Ugly, but it works in my case.

[THRobinson]

I'll give that a try when I get home. v15.x works just fine, but, hate not updating because of what seems to be a silly issue.

Again, if I have a keyboard hooked up, I can click the WINDOWS key, or Alt+Tab, leave KODI and then click back and from there it seems to work without any issues. So, it's not as if my system simply won't handle v16.x it runs it just fine... but this black screen at startup is really driving me nuts.

[zerocool_ie]

I'll give that a try when I get home. v15.x works just fine, but, hate not updating because of what seems to be a silly issue.

Again, if I have a keyboard hooked up, I can click the WINDOWS key, or Alt+Tab, leave KODI and then click back and from there it seems to work without any issues. So, it's not as if my system simply won't handle v16.x it runs it just fine... but this black screen at startup is really driving me nuts.

On the AMD GPU machine, this solves the only issue I have - black screen on startup.

The Intel GPU machine is another story.
It has the black screen on startup issue and after I watch one episode/movie/whatever in a list, then try to play the next item in the list - I get a black screen flicker every half second.
My old fix was to navigate to a different show, play an episode, stop the episode, then go back to the original show and episode I wanted to watch.
Spouse acceptance factor = very low.
Now we just hit \ to go windowed, then \ to go fullscreen again and the episode plays without flicker.

I really don't want to buy two new machines when the two I have (2007/08) are more than capable of playing any media I can throw at them (annoyances aside!)

[THRobinson]

I hear ya... I hate when people comment so casually to run out and either buy a new card or build a new machine.

Last summer, before I built a new one for my main PC... my media server (in my signature) worked as my main computer, my media player and had a network cable running to the front TV for media as well. I'd be playing Warcraft or editing in Photoshop, while watching an 8GB copy of a movie, while someone in the front room was also watching a movie, and I had no lag or issues with the game, software or video.

System may not be the newest, but definitely powerful enough to play a single movie on it's own, and as mentioned previously, video card listed as DirectX11.1 so, hardware wise, I'm hoping to avoid changing anything, because it all "should" work.

I'll try that thing you mentioned... just strange that when I searched I found SO many threads about this same issue, and so little about a fix... apart from again, build a new PC or buy a new GPU.

[THRobinson]

Rebooted 3x and so far it's working... get a flicker as it switches modes, but only for a second or two and back to normal.

Thanks for the help.

Though, still interested in finding a fix for the issue... maybe v17? then again, may make it worse... seems for me, I get things running fine, then a new version releases, and something breaks. :S

[zerocool_ie]

Rebooted 3x and so far it's working... get a flicker as it switches modes, but only for a second or two and back to normal.

Glad to hear it's helped