I recently installed Slackware 12.1 with KDE 3.5 as the desktop. My video card is a Radeon 9250. I installed everything on the install discs, so I have Noatun, xine, gxine multimedia players installed. Trouble is none of them will play any video files of either .avi or mpeg format. I downloaded and installed mplayer including the codec package, but that doesn't work either - every application plays the file but with a blank screen.
Obviously, I failed to install some essential library or need to configure something, but I don't know what.
Suggestions much appreciated.

1) what is your codec path?
2) paste here your ld.so.conf

You need to extract mplayer codecs to /usr/share/codecs/, that is also the default path for Xine codecs, so even if you dont install mplayer, you can play most of the videos with Xine alone, and if you are compiling mplayer from source, be sure to set all mplayer codec paths to the /usr/share/codecs/ directory.

You will also need Libdvdcss2 to play dvd's.
Also the binary codec should be installed as follows:

This comes from the Mplayer website.
Hope this helps...
Regards.
The trooper.

Sounds to me more like an X problem.

If mplayer can't find the codec it shouldn't even start, just bail with an error message. If it *plays* but you have no image, this points to a problem with X.

Make sure you have the XVideo entension (this should be enabled by default). Check this with

xdpyinfo | grep XVideo

Check your X log file (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) for error messages.

Thanks, I'll try the above suggestions.

The codec path is /usr/lib/codecs and ld.so.conf is:

/usr/local/lib
/usr/i486-slackware-linux/lib
/usr/lib/qt/lib
/usr/lib/seamonkey


Cheers.

ld.so.conf is for linux dynamic libraries, and is use by the dynamic linker (/lib/ld-linux.so.2) when loading an executable. It has nothing to do with win32 codecs and is not related to the use of "plug-ins".

I've been trying a lot of things to fix the problem with my video players. Codec paths seem to be fine, and I've tried all sorts of modifications to xorg.conf, without fixing the problem.
Then, while mucking around, I found how to play any video. First, I try to open a video in Konqueror, with the usual result, a blank screen. BUT - if while that is playing unsuccessfully, I open up Noatun, I can play any video successfully in Noatun; but only while the other is playing unsuccessfully!
It works the other way around, starting one video in Noatun I can play any other video in Konqueror. I haven't finished trying all the players yet but I think gxine also works in this fashion.
I'm stumped. Anybody got any suggestions as to what is going on?

----lets try this way----------

edit your ld.so.conf become like this, i just add one top line

-------------
/usr/lib
/usr/local/lib
/usr/i486-slackware-linux/lib
/usr/lib/qt/lib
/usr/lib/seamonkey
------------

save the file then run /sbin/ldconfig as root the try play again

You don't need /usr/lib in ld.so.conf, /usr/lib is searched automatically.

Well I fixed the problem using the brute force approach - reinstalling the operating system. Now the video players are working fine. Obviously some configuration thing went wrong the first time around.