Thanks Celine!

I want to try something. Is there anyway I can capture a log of what's happening when I go to open a movie and it fails? I have VLC player as well as Movie Player that comes with Ubuntu. This may she more light as to what is happening.

Yes, you can do that. Usually, if the application is not making its own log somewhere, we would start it from a console, and use shell redirection to send all output to a file, like so:
That will redirect all output to the file called "some_file". If the application (vlc in my example) is producing meaningful output when a problem occurs, it should appear in the file. Basically, the file will capture all the stuff that normally goes onto your console window.

NOTE: WHen wanting to start an application like this, check the manpage to see if there are any additional options that the application can accept, to make it more verbose or to make it output additional information (more than it usually would). Commonly -v or --verbose are used to make an app more verbose.

How exactly do I run that command. What steps are involved?

Look in your menu and locate the terminal, I believe it's called "Gnome-terminal" on Ubuntu.

Start a terminal (Click the application). You should now have a terminal window, with a little command prompt in it.

At that prompt, enter the following:
NOTE: Replace "vlc" with whatever is the name of the application you want to start.

Now, the application should start. Use it. When done using it, close or exit the application.

Now, you should type into the terminal:
Somewhere in the list of files we just listed using the `ls` command, you should see your new file, called "my_output_file", which contains anything outputted by the application.

To view that file from your terminal, type ONE of:
Now you can scroll up/down using cursor keys or pageup/down keys or maybe mouse, and you can copy/paste using mouse. When finished looking at the file, press Q.

In a terminal, of course.

To run Cheese Webcam Booth and capture all its output:

It will write all output to the file "cheese.log".

Note that programs actually have two outputs: stdout and stderr. ">" writes stdout to a file, "2>" writes stderr to a file, and "&>" writes both.

Nothing is in the file. It just says my_output_file (END)

What application did you use? cheese, or vlc or something else?

I use vlc.

OK, I haven't got vlc installed, but internet claims that it has a --help option. In a terminal type:
That will show you options that vlc can accept when you run it. See if there's a "--verbose" option, or a "--debug" option, something that says it will make the program output more information. If so, add it to the command I gave earlier, like so:
Now use the application, and again, when done, examine the file created (named "my_output_file" in this example..

If there's no verbose or debug or similar option, then I do not know of a way to make it tell us what it's problem is. Perhaps then try `cheese` as suggested by MTK358

This is what I saw when running Movie Player:

The program 'totem' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.
(Details: serial 578 error_code 11 request_code 132 minor_code 19)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)


What should I do?

If that's correct, and there's a bug in the program, there's not much you can do but report the bug and/or use another program, and/or fix the bug. Or maybe see if there's a newer version of the program, that has already been fixed (check your Synaptic tool for that).

Sometimes I'll search Google for the error message and see what other people have discovered about it. I would search for, in this case:
and see if anything turned up that made sense to me.

I think I am making some headway. I turned Compiz off and now Movie Player works fine. VLC still won't play anything.

this is for the webcam

gstreamer-properties


open a terminal type, gstreamer-properties click enter
click video try v4l1 and v4l2
click the bottom test button for each 1

cheese has a nice help file look in the faq's

try the cam in cheese

hope that helps

This is the error I get for Video for Linux (v4l) when I press on the test button.

Video for Linux (v4l): Device "/dev/video0" does not exist.

This is the error I get for Video for Linux (v4l)

Video for Linux 2 (v4l2): Cannot identify device '/dev/video0'.

what comes up if you type webcam in a terminal