I can't get any video files to play in kubuntu. I have tried noatun, which doesn't play, kaffeien crashes, it says no decoders found to handle the stream. XMMS works for playing audio files, but when I try to open a video file, it come up with an open file dialog box, and won't play. I am not worried about getting any particular player working, I just want to be able to watch video files and dvds. I don't know if this is a video output issue either, I didn't see any options in xmms though. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am still pretty new to the whole linux thing, so no amount of detail is too much. Thanks, Jeff

Have a look at:
http://debian.video.free.fr/
and install mplayer (and w32codecs)

have you tried vlc media player?

I managed to get mplayer and the respective codecs downloaded and installed. It plays the video nicely, but I am not getting audio. I beleive I am using alsa on xmms, I have a usb sound card on a laptop, so it's not the default card. Also, mplayer isn't included in the k menu listings. How do you get it in the menu? When I right click on the window no dialog boxes come up, on others that I know of, you can set the options that way. Any help would be great. Thanks so much already.

Excellent.

To get a nice gui, rather than just the player itself, try executing
$ gmplayer

To confirm that mplayer will work with alsa
$ gmplayer -ao alsa
you can add a line like:
ao=alsa
to ~/.mplayer/config once you get it working
You might want to have a look at the various alsa commands:
$ apropos alsa

To have gmplayer in your menu open your menu editor
and add an entry for /usr/bin/gmplayer

when I type in gmplayer, it says command not found. does the same thing regardless of whether I am in the MPlayer folder. Is there something I missed downloading, or am I doing something wrong?

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/gui.html

$ ./configure --enable-gui