Hey everyone, was hoping I could get some help with getting video to run in ubuntu 9.10 on my Dell Latitude D620.

I've followed some guides online and installed a bunch of codecs but can't get video to play (at the moment I'm using vbox to run xp to watch videos!)

I've downloaded a bunch of video players and they all have the same behaviour, audio plays, but no video.

The weird thing is I can see a slither of video at the top of the screen on the laptop monitor (I'm using dual monitors).

I also can't seem to enable visual effects etc, so I'm thinking maybe it might have something to do with video drivers rather than a codec problem? In the hardware drivers application (in system --> administration) it says there are no proprietary drivers in use.

Thank you in advance for the help, as soon as I can get video's running I can make the full leap to linux!

What kind of videos ? WMV, MOV... DVDs?

to see if direct rendering is enabled for your video card - but that probably is not your 'playing videos' problem.

lspci to see your video adapter type (probably intel)

That's normal if you don't have hardware that requires proprietary drivers.

Ubuntu has a convenient package that installs most the non-free programs people commonly want, including many codecs.
What you need depends on the video player you use. The default, Totem, as well as Banshee and a couple of others use gstreamer. These should be installed with the above.

Kaffeine, I believe Dragon, and some others use xine. I believe this should get you what you need there
Mplayer is its own thing. Enable the medibuntu repository to get extra mplayer codecs and libdvdcss, necessary for any app to play commercial DVDs, plus an unstripped version of libavcodec, the library for ffmpeg.
Once done