hey guys, ive recently installed suse 9.3 on my computer, and i dled something that id really love to watch, but its in .avi format. when i click it, i can hear the sound but all i see is a black screen.
thanks in advance for your help

care to actaully tell us what app this is???

Also, is it a regular avi file of is it a divx avi? if that's the case, you'll need aditional codecs to watch it properly

you probably need the w32codecs. Or, from the Mplayer homepage (where they came from).

avi is not a format, it's a container. the "format" of the video would be divx, mpeg2 etc...

ive tried with a bunch of different apps such as totem xine noatun and kaffiene
with all of them i just get a black screen, but when i try to play it with xine it says:
the stream '/home/gold/Family.Guy.avi' use an unsupported codec :
Video Codec: XVID format (XVID)
start playback anyway?
if i click yes i just get sound and the black screen.
i installed the xvid codec, but that hasnt changed anything.
how do i find out what format or other information about the file? id give better descriptions but i dont even know what is important or how to access the information
thanks

Again, get the w32codecs from the mplayer home page and follow the instructions to install them. Then try again.

hey guys thanks for the help ive got the files playing now, but can somebody tell me how to make mplayer run with its gui, it only has command line right now
thanks

Try gmplayer (it should have come with mplayer, I think)