I need to play an .avi file - it’s an Internet link, and if I open it in firefox I see a black screen with a large white/grey square and a red X in the middle.
During a long IRC session I removed everything from videolan except libdvdcss, and installed all the codecs afresh with videolan disabled. This has made no difference. What else should I look at?
Can you provide the internet link?
I typically use mplayerplug-in and flash-player to play my internet multimedia.
http://plasma.kde.org/media/plasma_4.2_overview_sm.avi
I later watched the video on my Fedora box, so I know that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it.
I just tested it, and it plays fine on my openSUSE-10.3 PC (32-bit) with firefox and mplayerplug-in. I checked the file, and it uses FMP4 video codec, and mp3 audio codec. I believe FMP4 is an MPEG-4 video codec.
I think it should “just work” with mplayer (and hence “just work” with mplayerplug-in" on firefox). I also note the packman packaged libffmpeg0 should support it.
There was a bug in the packman packaged libcaca (which is used by mplayer, which may have “bit” you and caused this problem). Please see this thread: mplayer error with latest libcaca0 - openSUSE Forums
Note the work arounds to re-install libcaca to enable mplayer (and hence mplayerplug-in) to work.
Today I have resolved the problem. I read a few similar threads from this forum, so picked up the reference to 1-click installs. From that site I installed everything even remotely connected with video, so I can’t tell exactly what it was that did the trick. It could well have been MPlayer.
Anyway, the upshot is that I can now play the .avi and youtube videos work perfectly. Another happy bunny, thanks 
AnneW
I’ve also been having problems with video playback. No video but audio when I tried Xv yesterday. Crappy playback with xshm.
I am trying to use xine and had the vlc codec problem. I fixed this and was able to get video running in xine but it won’t use Xv. Xvinfo use to give me a lot of data, but since I started messing with opengloverlay and videooverlay I now get xvinfo saying no adapters present. I guess I am both lost and confused. I updated the fglrx drivers just today.
Whats the boolean string for opengloverlay?
I have video in xine with xshm but it sucks. Gets choppy as I make the screen bigger.
Any ideas?
Do not use special desktop effects. You could also try x11 as your output video mode, although xv (xvideo) should work with better performance (when special desktop effects are disabled).
I have an old athlon-1100 with an old NVidia GeForce2 mx400 and I get fine performance with xine.
The latest vlc is choppy with mpeg. I downgraded to an older vlc and get fine performance.