This happened about 3 days ago. I don't know why or how, but suddenly xine won't play back any of the video files that it used to play perfectly on my mahcine because it says that the xvid codec is missing. I've been doing my research and couldn't find any specific cause to the problem. I checked my packages and sure enough xvid was installed, so I just re-installed xvid and xine to see if that would help but it didn't.


Does anyone have a clue on what went wrong or how I can fix it? (I'm running sarge btw). Is this a bug in the package system perhaps? Or is there a way I can specifically tell xine that "look, the codec is right here, use it". Because it's on my system and the problem seems to be that xine can't find it. I have no idea how this happened, maybe it was during one of my package upgrades (which I do bi-daily). Thanks for any help.

Did you try to see if 'Kaffiene' (a KDE front end for xine) is working?
Did you try to see if 'mplayer' is working?

mplayer is working the same it always has been. i have some trouble with mplayer too though, like it always bringing up a dialogue box saying such and such font could not be found when I play a new video file, and the full screen mode keeps the video in the original size but makes the rest of the screen black.


I haven't gotten around to fiddling with mplayer much yet. I got it from an unofficial package repository somewhere and I only like to use it when xine fails to play some funky encoded video.

I am sorry I couldn't really help you. But for the mplayer fonts problem, you need
to install the 'mplayer-fonts' package.

Ok, thanks for the tip. Now mplayer doesn't annoy me about those fonts. If I could figure out how to get full-screen working in mplayer, then I might just use it and forget about xine...

Sorry to bump this one but I see no real solution was given, and I've recently run into the exact same issue with xine -- I hadn't made any updates or changes and all of a sudden (after 1 year+ of working), xine fails to play back xvid content with an error stating it can't find the xvid codec. mplayer etc. are able to play back the videos just fine, and my codecs directory (which I am pointing to in the decoder section in xine) is correct.

Anyone have any insight into why this might suddenly happen randomly? I've tried reinstalling xine, checked the permissions on the codec directory, reinstalled xine, and the libxine1-ffmpeg package, but no luck. TIA.

Same here and no idea what could be wrong.

Found the problem -- apparently some part of my xine config had gotten screwed up... moved my ~/.xine directory elsewhere and started up xine again (which recreated the .xine directory), and xvid started working again... very strange since there was no indication of any kind of corruption, I had not upgraded/changed anything, and xine worked fine apart from anything with the xvid codec. Hope this helps someone.

Thanks for the tip wiplash! But I checked which config file is messing with the xine codec list and there's no need do remove the entire folder, just this file:

to allow mplayer to resize the video in the fullscreen mode you have to add this to its config file:

(yeah, I known: it's a stupid decision of the mplayer team to leave this option disabled by default...)

Have you checked the dates on this thread?