VLC just stopped playing mp4 videos.

English Multimedia
1

Hi all,
Running Linux 3.1.10-1.16-desktop x86_64 with openSUSE 12.1 (x86_64) and KDE: 4.7.2 (4.7.2) “release 5”.
I am a fan of VLC so use it on most machines to play videos from my NAS. Tonight it has just stopped displaying the video. The playing screen appears and progress slider and elapsed time all work as usual but no picture.

There have been a few recent changes to my machine. First I had to switch to Printing Repo to get HP printers to work after they broke on an update. Then I had to clean up my multimedia libraries by switching amarok to Packman version. This made many very changes and enabled me to get updates of ffmpeg etc although I now do not have amarok because there is a dependency missing.

It appears however that VLC has been broken. I have just updated VLC to 2.0.5-102.4 from Packman but to no avail although there are no dependency issues being reported. Please could somebody point me in right direction to sort this out

Regards,
Budgie2

2

Make sure all your codecs etc come from the Packman repo. Open a termnal window and do:

  • Start Yast - Software - Software Management
  • Select View - Repositories
  • Select the Packman repo
  • On the top right, you’ll see “Switch system packages …”. click that, and accept the changes.
  • Let Software Management do it’s job and try playing the video again.
3

Hi and many thanks for the reply. Did all that before but no Joy. However I found a thread on google as follows:-

You have configured X Server correctly.

Open VLC Player, Go to Preferences – Video – highlight Output Modules.
Check Advanced Options at the bottom and select X11 video output from the drop-down list.

Restart VLC Player.

The option was not quite where described but I found it and selected X11 video output modes and that did the trick. I have no idea how this setting became altered but it must have switched to a different default during the switch to Packman I did previously when as I described.
Thanks again. Hope the above helps someone else.
Regards,
Budgie2

4

Nice, sorted. Thanks for getting back with the solution.

5

This problem sometimes occurs in mplayer too. If you don’t choose the correct video and audio outputs videos

6

VLC does support MP4 files. However, sometime we still fail to play MP4 in VLC.

The following will describe the reason and how to successful play MP4 in VLC.

7

VLC does play MP4 files, but it has strict limitations: VLC Media Player is only compatible with MPEG-4 ASP, DivX 4/5/6, XviD, 3ivX D4 and H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC. However, MP4 is a multimedia container format with many kinds of video and audio codecs. If your MP4 file contains a VLC unsupported audio or video codec, VLC won’t play it.

Here is a step by step guide on how to successfully solve “VLC not playing MP4” issue with ease.

Hope it will help you more or less.

8

Had same problem on my clean Leap 42.1 and this solution using “X11 video output” solved my problem too - Thanks so much.:wink: