VLC Media Player Blocky, greying out.

Hopefully anyone suffering the same problems that I have been through might find this helpful rather than wasting hours trying various "Non Solutions" to what at first appeared to be a VLC problem.

I have a few torrent movies saved to disk and recently when playing the movies via VLC the movie would become greyed out and blocky.

After searching online there are various recommendations on changing VLC settings to cure this. None of which by the way worked in the slightest.

I knew it was not the actual movie file as blocking would occur randomly, and if I backtracked to where the blocks occurred it was no longer blocky.

I also noticed frequent media / server disconnects when using Plex to play the movies onto my remote TV.

I downloaded the Sea Tools for Windows and ran the SMART tests and all was fine.

However, I ran the Short Generic test and the drive failed.

The drive was also beginning to run noticeably slower than it did in the past.

I managed to copy all of the movie files over to a fresh drive, which took ages.

I checked again using SMART and again it passed all tests, however within about 20 minutes the entire drive had disappeared from the system, it would randomly reappear and disappear throughout the day until it finally gave up and died.

So despite passing SMART tests until it finally died, this disk was on its way out.

So if you are getting weird grey blocking of movies on VLC, (and some reduced performance in the Windows Films and TV app) it might be worth downloading Sea Tools or the WD equivalent and running the generic basic disk tests rather than relying on the SMART system.