Video playback not working on iPad 1

Last night, while trying to play a movie on my iPad to keep my two-year-old twins distracted during dinner at a restaurant (which works beautifully, I might add), I turned on my iPad and hit the VIDEOS icon. I've noticed that lately it takes several seconds for the menu of videos (or last-played video, depending on how I last exited the player) to come up, but last night niether one ever did come up.

I just got a black screen, with the normal top row of status indicators (WiFi status, time, etc.) but no icons for my videos and no in-progress video. I tried this several times (clicked the Home button and re-launched VIDEOS), powered down and restarted the iPad, and always got similar results. The only variation may be that sometimes I get the status bar items, sometimes not. But always over a solid black screen.

I do get the spinning "wait" wheel animation for about half a second shortly after calling up VIDEOS, but it doesn't continue and even if I let the iPad sit for several minutes, I get nothing.

I did recall seeing a one-time message the other day on the iPad saying that disk space is getting very low and I should delete a few things. I only ever saw that message once. So I ran a little utility I have on the iPad which shows current memory and battery state, and it did show that I had only about 15 MB free. This was odd because I knew the last time I chedked it in iTunes, I had 1.5 GB free. So I deleted one or two apps directly from the iPad and tried VIDEOS again - still nothing.

When we got home, I synced to iTunes, which did report 1.5 GB free. I removed a couple videos and some more apps using iTunes, and synced a couple times just to be sure. Today, still, no video playback. No list of videos (although iTunes confirms that I still have several on there). It's really weird.

I hate to jump right in and do the iTunes restore method - I can't even think about how long that will take - so I figured I'd check here first to see if anyone else has any suggestions.

This is a first-generation iPad (arrived on the day they were released) and all its software is up-to-date.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

- Mike