I'm having problems with SuSE 8.1 when it comes to playing avi files. I have installed avifile and mplayer. I also installed some sort of qtavi something or other (most likely not necessary) When I click on the avi I see a window briefly flicker and die while the sound plays perfectly in the background. I had the same problem using xine under SuSE 8.0. Mpegs play perfectly. What am I doing wrong?

And as always, thanks to all for the excellent help.

When you say 'When I click on the avi file...', what file browser are you using, and what program are you using to watch the file?

I'm currently using konqueror with the default application set to mplayer.

Thank you. It sounds like you may have a problem with your codecs. Could you open a console and run mplayer (with the same options as you've specified in your konqueror file-associations thing) on a file, and post any erros, or anything that looks out of the ordinary, here? Cheers.

Well, I had figured that it would be a problem with my codecs, as my mpegs were playing just fine. I don't like to think of myself as a complete linux newbie, but judging from the bulk of my questions one would wonder. I ran mplayer in command line, and saw that it told me to try and update my user codec.conf file, which I did. Still no luck.

With a little digging around I reallized that the win32 codec rpm I was using left the codecs with root only permisions. I gave broad user permissions to the codecs and problem solved.

As I said before thanks for all of the help that everybody so kindly shares here. This has got to be the best site of it's kind. I have been using linux off and on for 4 years, and steadily for the past year. I only found this site 3 months ago and have found it to be an invaluable asset. Anybody who's helped me and finds themselves around Stuttgart Germany has earned themselves a free beer :-) Thanks