No Videos, Audio Fine

[jmadero]

Hi All,

I can't play video on any player (vlc, mplayer, totem), the files open, sound works, but video is black. I suspect something went wrong when I upgraded to VLC 1.1.4 using a ppa, I've read that the ffmpeg can screw up and then video just stops. Trying to play m4v, mkv, avi, none work.

Not sure what to do, reinstalling seems like a hassle. Already tried removing vlc and the new ppa, tried removing ffmpeg and reinstalling, removing ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Any suggestions would be really appreciated, reinstalled netbook edition and vlc wouldn't install because of missing dependencies so I used that ppa to get 1.1.4 installed. Thanks!

[Rubberman]

That's what happens when you decide to fall over the bleading edge. Ubuntu 10.10 is still, in my opinion, a work-in-progress.

Pardon my ignorance, but exactly what do you mean by "upgraded to VLC 1.1.4 using a ppa"? Were other components upgraded also? Another thing is that VLC has no basic dependencies on ffmpeg unless you are using VLC to transcode or stream videos. Did you also update ffmpeg?

[jmadero]

I think I figured it out and it's unrelated to either vlc or Ubuntu 10.10, I think it's the poulsbo driver for netbooks. On the Ubuntu hardware support components page it lists poulsbo as "Broken" under "Normal Video Playback (Xv)", I didn't know what this was before but now I suspect it means I can't use any software to watch videos of any kind (avi, mkv, etc...), this is a pretty big deal for us so hopefully the people out there developing the driver can solve it soon.

As for the other comments, I think Ubuntu 10.10 being a stable release means it's not quite as "bleeding edge". Personally I run beta's often and rarely hit problems, even less so for release candidates. Occasionally I do see a bug in a new stable release but it's almost just as likely that I'll hit one in a release that is 4-6 months old. This is just from my experience running Ubuntu since Ubuntu 7.04.

Thanks for the suggestions and if you know anything about the poulsbo driver I'd love to hear an update as to how long the playing videos has been an issue.