A long time ago I had vlc working on my system, but along the way I did an upgrade and vlc stopped working. More specifically, the audio codecs seem to work just fine, but there is no video.

I am now fiddling with this a bit and would like to get the video running. However vlc does not seem to be able to locate the codecs or where the codecs are supposed to go.

I did visit the vlc homepage, read the faq and the installation instructions, and come up pretty much blank.

The codecs for vlc appear to be located in /usr/lib/vlc/codec (and also in /usr/local/lib/vlc/codec) and doing an strace vlc indicates that it is looking in the right place for them.

But the preferences Input/Codecs section shows only a Theora codec and a Fake codec and I get no video.

Running VLC from the command line gives this error on an avi:

and gives this error on a wmv:
The system is Mandriva 2008 and it is vlc 0.8.6.

Anyone know what is happening?

One shortcut I've found most effective is to give the install command from the terminal. That usually fixes broken/missing packages/links/dependencies, etc.

Otherwise, you can go here for a debugger. I would assume there's a universal problem with VLC in Mandriva, since a debugger page exists.

Cheers

Are you running a 64 bit kernel or a 32 bit version? If you have moved to 64, the codecs need to be in the lib64 folder.

Other than that, not much I can offer as I run FC7...

HTH

Michael

The system is 32 bit.

I downloaded and installed that debug package, but could not make it work.

It was the weirdest thing. It installed to /usr/lib/debug/vlc and put a whole bunch of stuff there. In /usr/lib/debug/vlc/bin were a number of executables with proper permissions etc including a program called vlc.debug. But vlc.debug wouldn't run. I mean, when I cd into that directory, and did a ./vlc.debug the message I got back was "no such file or directory".

Well, I played with that for a bit then uninstalled the package.

Kinda a stupid question, but did you reinstall the codecs to try to rectify this?

Uninstalled the whole package and reinstalled it. I don't see a specific codecs package, which is something I have been wondering about. But the codecs are where they apparently are supposed to be.

...and, after a long time, a solution.

I just rolled my system forward to Mandriva 2008.1, and tried to use VLC for video again...and it didn't work.

So, as I had done previously, I ran it from the command line to see what it said. This time (and I don't know if I just overlooked this before or not) that "no video filter matched scale".

So I tracked that one into preferences and turned off the only filter that was specified, that one being the "video scaling filter".

Suddenly, I at least had a vlc window that had a section in it for video, though that section was blank. This was progress, and there was no further warning about the filter.

It even would play an mpeg, but not an avi. When I tried to play an avi, I got the error message "[00000313] main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `DX50'.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format."

So I entered that error message into google, and quickly came up with this thing to try:

vlc -v --reset-plugins-cache

So I did.

And it worked. Now VLC is working just fine.

I'm having this exact same issue trying to play an avi.

along with :
I've tried flushing the cache and many of the other things mentioned to no effect. Ideas?