I'm new to Linux, and have been fighting VLC in Fedora, for over a week. Finally, went to Mint last night because it is supposed to be great for playing multimedia.

I have VLC 2.0.8, and it's supposedly up to date. It flat refuses to play anything. Not in Fedora, not in Mint, not even in Windows 7. Well, I take that back, it will play SOMEtimes, but not all the time. Are there certain things I should be changing, setting up, what? to make this work? VLC is/was the best thing next to bread, but I'll be hanged if I can get it to work. I have 2.1.3 on the W7 machine and it did open a commercial DVD. I'm not stupid, and I've never had a problem with plugging and playing things in VLC, but for the life of me, it's got me stumped.

Is there another multimedia player that will work? When I had Fedora, I think I got every codec known to man, and FINALLY got SMPlayer to work, but VLC still refused. How can it be so popular, but won't work for ME??? Sorry, if some of you have seen this problem on the Fedora Forum. I thought I had it fixed.

Thanks!

What exactly types of files are you trying to play?

Also, did you install VLC from the Mint software center? I installed VLC from the MINT repos on my Mint box and, so far, it has played everything I've asked it to play.

Hi, Frank, I was trying to play anything! I sometimes have videos I download from Youtube, sometimes they are from websites, like video classes, I got a set of videos from a seminar I attended, plus, there's the bought movies, etc. I had JUST gotten things to run, sort of, in Fedora, when I switched to Mint 16 KDE, last night. Then of course, I couldn't play anything, again. I've chosen the online class video, the DVD's from the seminar, and a commercial movie, as my test subjects.

Right after I posted this, I was exploring and messing around, and hit "open">"file" and there, on the side, was my video (in the DVD player. Out of curiosity, I clicked on that, and the file showed up in the box. I clicked it, and then hit "Open", and voila! it started playing!! In Windows, you insert the video, a window opens and you click play with...and it starts playing...usually. Even there, I've had VLC refusing to open. I will try the file thing next time, but I never had to do that before. I've never had a problem with VLC before, but have to admit, Real Player was my default.

Glad you got it working.

You might consider making VLC the default in your system for various file types. You can do this by pointing to the DVD in your file manager, right-clicking, and selecting "Open with Other." When the "Other" dialog opens, there's a checkbox to make the selected choice the default. You can do this for each type of file you want to default to VLC.

I remember Real Audio--the most locked-down codec of all. They used to have a Linux version which was much less obnoxious than the Windows version, but that project died about three years ago.

I know of at least one website that defaulted to Real when they were the bee's knees and the cat's meow that is probably regretting it today.