I just downloaded Gothic, and the game doesn't play any in-game video. It has the audio from them, but just a black screen. This goes for the movies before the menu screen and the game's introduction as well.
Thanks for the help!

Scale 0 worked here to, thanks!

Disabling scaling didn't work for me. In fact, none of the tricks I found on the 'net did anything. What did work, however, was setting SLI rendering mode to "Single-GPU" in the nvidia control panel. For whatever reason it just won't show videos with SLI enabled. This also fixes the loading screen (which for me always flickered badly and never showed a moving progress bar) and doesn't appear to have any performance impact on my rig.

One thing I ran into, is this. The mod patch is required to allow the fps patch to be applied. Installing the mod patch causes the Gothic_mod.exe to be run in place of Gothic.exe, so make sure your application specific graphics card settings are bound to the application that is actually running (Gothic_mod.exe.)

Copy the ini file to the desktop, modify it, and copy it back. This is due to having installed the game to a UAC controlled directory, so you need admin access to modify the file.

I assume everybody knows for Win 7 you shouldn't install games to Program Files. Not just Gothic, everything. They should be installed elsewhere, UAC should be off, and also admin rights should be selected in compatibility mode.

If people have problems with videos on older games not displaying properly, another trick you can try is to edit video scaling for your graphics card. There should be a control panel tool for your card installed on your system. Open it up, find where it is set to automatically scale videos, and turn it off. This helped me with at least one game.

UAC should be on. If you install the programs to a non-UAC controlled environment, UAC shouldn't matter either way, thus leave it on. You could do it the proper way and just set proper permissions to the game's folder, but a bit complicated for most. Run as Administrator should also not be needed in most cases, since what you are doing with all 3 of these is circumvent UAC. Thus much easier, faster and safer to just install to a non-UAC folder.

UAC interfered with a few of my own installations on Win 7, and lacking admin rights prevented me playing some games. I've seen similar advice in numerous other game forums.

Just open the game file: Gothic.ini (configuration file) in your Gothic 2 game folder.

There you only have to change the point: scaleVideos=1 into scaleVideos=0.

After that it was working on my computer.

This worked perfectly, thanks schoenername, and everyone else who made a suggestion. Awesome game. Fosse's question described exactly what happening when I tried to play.