My windows does not show thumbnail for ANY video format

Question

i'm pretty sure a while back my .mp4's showed thumbnails, because i was researching how to make windows show thumbnails for .mov ,but i just realized that now even .mp4 don't show previews, wich is really annoying when trying to work.

please help, both recovering the mp4 thumbnails and also how to make .mov show preview as well.

• It does not matter wich folder, all of them doesn't show thumbnail
• Yes i have the option to "only show icons instead of miniatures" UNCHECKED
• I used chatgpt to try and diagnose this and did a bunch of things, even installed and even paid for programs, but STILL not working
• ❌ It’s not the Media Feature Pack ❌ It’s not Windows N ❌ It’s not a codec issue ❌ It’s not an Explorer configuration problem ❌ It’s not a thumbnail cache issue ❌ It’s not a simple registry setting
• ^^ thats what chat gpt conclude after severall testing, but it couldn't fix as well.

Answer 1

I see your locale is Portuguese (Brazil); however, since you’re using English, I’ll continue the support in this language. Let me know if you’d like to change the language later.

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Hi leonardo fontaine,

Thank you for contacting the Microsoft Q&A forum. I know how frustrating this is, especially when you're working with many videos and suddenly File Explorer stops displaying previews for all of them.

Here are a few things that sometimes solve the problem, if you want to try the less invasive options first:

• Open one of the affected videos using Photos (not Media Player), let it play for a few seconds, close it, and refresh File Explorer. In some cases, this forces Windows to re-register the thumbnail manager.
• If these files are in a folder synced with OneDrive, try copying one or two videos to a local folder (for example, C:\VideoTest) and see if the thumbnails appear there. OneDrive integration is known to specifically interfere with video thumbnails.

Please keep me informed of the progress and don't hesitate to contact me if you need any further assistance.

Thank you again for your patience.

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Answer 2

Opening the video with photo instead of media player worked! after playing the video for a few seconds and reloading the explorer, all videos got thumbnails showing. Thank you so much!