.AVI's will not play...

[kwatson30]

It seems like my .avi files will not play. All the programs will open the file and then close before it can play the video. I have searched all over, and tried everything (so I think) and nothing has worked!! Please help, starting to annoyed of not being able to play videos. Also, this is only what's saved to the desktop... haven't had any problems on websites.

Using Ubuntu 9.04... hope this helps...

[Hal343]

Have you installed VLC? It seems to be one of the better players for me.

[kwatson30]

Yeap, VLC is actually the program that I got the video to play last week, but now none of the video players will work.

[Hal343]

Do you get an error message when they refuse to play? libdvdcss2 or libdvdcss is the library needed for .avi and .wmv files. I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and play them in VLC, Kaffeine,Movie Player and MPlayer Movie Player.

[reed9]

Do you get an error message when they refuse to play? libdvdcss2 or libdvdcss is the library needed for .avi and .wmv files. I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and play them in VLC, Kaffeine,Movie Player and MPlayer Movie Player.

As far as I know, libdvdcss2 is only for decoding commercial DVDs.

Try

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

This should install all of what you need to play restricted media formats.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

There are a few codecs that are not available in the Ubuntu repos, but are in the 3rd party medibuntu repos.

If none of that works, you can use mediainfo to find out more info on how the file is encoded, and possibly find a solution.

[kwatson30]

I've downloaded all of these prior, and the mediainfo application gives me errors when trying to install. Any other ideas?

[ubuntu-pc-geek]

maybe your packages are corrupted try re installing them or the only time this happened to me when i tried what i have just suggested. in the end i had to repair ubuntu from recovery, but this isn't always the case it could be more then just codec or package problems run a diagnostic or error report on ubuntu and post it back here for us to have a look at.

[reed9]

I've downloaded all of these prior, and the mediainfo application gives me errors when trying to install. Any other ideas?

Ah, looking closer at the getdeb page, they only have mediainfo packages for intrepid, which is probably the install problem. I assume you're running Jaunty? The project site has more up to date packages.

Also, if you have mplayer installed, try opening one of the files from the command line. It may give you some useful error output you can post.

mplayer /path/to/file.avi

[kwatson30]

CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing /home/us/Desktop.
Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: avisynth.dll, /usr/lib/win32/avisynth.dll, /usr/local/lib/win32/avisynth.dll
Seek failed

This is what it gave me in terminal...

[D-cat]

I don't think that's a legit AVI file... it looks more like an AVI script. Avisynth is not a codec, it's a windows program, kind of a command line version of VirtualDub used for scripting of video editing, sometimes live. No AVI file should be looking specifically for avisynth.dll, and it is not included in the W32codecs codecs package, probably because as I said, it is not a codec.