no video, just audio

[zorblek]

Binary package hint: vlc

Whenever I attempt to play a video using vlc, I get no video output and the error message "VLC does not support the audio or video format "[whatever format the video is]". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this." This happens regardless of what the format is. Audio still plays just fine, though. I have had this problem XVIDwith .mpg, .avi (with a variety of codecs, including xvid and divx), and .wmv.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: vlc 1.0.2-1~ppa1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: vlc
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-12-generic i686
UnreportableReason: This is not a genuine Ubuntu package

[zorblek (zorblek)]

Oddly, videos won't play in totem, either (and there is no audio in totem, either), but they will play in mplayer. When I attempt to play a video in totem, I get the message "Video codec '[whatever]' is not handled. You might need to install additional plugins to be able to play some types of movies."

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

As can be seen in your dependencies list, libavutil is not installed properly.
You did not install mplayer from some dubious third party multimedia repository, did you?

[zorblek (zorblek)]

I suspect that a video editor I added via a ppa installed its own version of mplayer, and that caused the problem. I can't verify that, though, because I reinstalled Ubuntu to upgrade to Karmic, and haven't experienced the problem since.