Anyone having issues with nVidia “smart” additions like “Play On My > Analog Display”? I do… at least I did, I had major problems with it.
If you noticed that your display blinks (it actually looks to me like my display is dying) every time you right click a video file, than you are probably pissed off at nVidia too. It’s annoying and worrying, every time you try to watch a video you fear for your display… is it going to live or not.
The worst thing about this “smart” feature is that nVidia has not provided an option to turn it off, like you really need something instead of “Properties” to be the last thing in context menu, and NVIDIA tries to mess that up for us without even bothering to ask for our permission.
Removing “Play On My” Feature
There were several stories circling the internet regarding how to get rid of POM, one of the interesting ones was: go find your old graphics card drivers and install them… yea right. Other one was that you have to go into registry editor (Start > Run > type “regedit”) and delete all occurrences of “PlayOnMyTv” and “FFB699E0-306A-11d3-8BD1-00104B6F7516”.
The second solution is closer to the real solution, basically you don’t have to delete that GUID string, just delete all “PlayOnMyTv” strings in registry. You can actually make a script to delete those every time you install new drivers and you’re going to need it because nVidia doesn’t seem to care about fixing it, they didn’t bother to change it for couple of years now, so they probably won’t do it in the near future either.
I even read on nVidia forums that this flickering is normal!?
OK, here is the stuff that you have to do:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AVIFile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\PlayOnMyTV] [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mpegfile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\PlayOnMyTV] [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WMVFile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\PlayOnMyTV] [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\WMVFile\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\PlayOnMyTV]
- Open your text editor (notepad) and enter text above in it.
- Save that file as some_name.reg (NOTE: extension “.reg” is the most important part) and after you have saved it, just double click that file and voila no more blinking/flashing of your display when you right click some video file.