Resident Evil 4 Black Screen Fix

If Resident Evil 4 (PC version) gives you a black screen after choosing your preferred language at startup, it is probably a codec conflict. You may need to unregister the specific codec to make it play the intro movie and the cutscenes (and thereby allowing you to get past the intro FMV and play the game normally).

I checked with Process Explorer to find the codecs used by the game and it gave me quartz.dll and splitter.ax, the former being part of windows while the latter is from haali. The haali filters were installed from an old version K-Lite Codec Pack which I forgot to uninstall when I got another codec pack. You will need to unregister the codec responsible to fix the issue.

To unregister codecs and COM type: regsvr32 /u <file-to-unregister>

So in your command prompt:
Find the codec splitter.ax usually installed in Program Files:

cd "Program Files"
dir splitter.ax /a/s/w

Change to the directory where splitter.ax resides: cd <directory>
Unregister splitter.ax, regsvr32 /u splitter.ax
Play the game!