[ubuntu-uk] Unable to play any videos....

[Dave Smith]

>Had an update last night early this morning, and it said that it was a 
>partial upgrade. I installed it, and now I cant play any videos at all.

>That is using Movie Player, VLC, Gnome Mplayer, no movie player will
now 
>work.
>
>Can somebody help please?
>
>John
>

Since I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, I have had some issues with video
playback.  It doesn't affect all my videos.

Near the beginning of an avi file, maybe in two places, four ascii
characters identify to the playback software what codec to use.  These
four character codes are known as fourcc.  When I have come across a
problem avi, Gnome player sits there and does nothing, and VLC gives me
an error message of (I paraphrase) "VLC cannot play this file because
the codec is XVID and not supported.  There is nothing you can do to
resolve this." I love that last bit ;-)

This got me thinking, because Linux can be a bit picky about what is in
upper or lower case, could it be that the 4cc must be xvid instead of
XVID or XviD.  Something changed between 9.04 and 9.10?  I had a similar
issue when MS WinXP decided to stop playing a Samsung codec because it
stopped recognising the fourcc.  Turned out that the Samsung codec was a
renamed XviD!!

So I got a Hex editor from the Ubuntu repositories, found all (one or
two) instances of XVID in the ascii representation of the code and
replaced it with xvid.  And they play fine then.

I don't know if this is related to your issue, but maybe worth a try.
And I'd be interested to know if anyone else has experienced something
similar.

Dave
Up North.