MEPIS Community Forum

I have tested several .avi files and they do play in VLC.

Same here.

Interesting. I've tried VLC on 3 different machines and it never worked for me on any of them. The latest is a fresh install of Mepis 11.0.12 I installed yesterday on a new system I just built. VLC just gave me a green screen. I wonder if you guys installed additional software from Debian media repos or something. Does VLC work on a live cd for you? I'm just giving suggestions to make sure everything works out of the box for new users. To add to that I have concluded that Kplayer is actually better than KMplayer. My conclusion is for the simple reason that Kplayer has volume control and KMplayer does not. I initially had no volume when I was watching my videos. I couldn't get any volume in KMPlayer, but Kplayer had a volume slider that was readily available. Interestingly it fixed the volume for both Kplayer and KMplayer.

The one other suggestion I would have is to replace Kmail with Thunderbird. I might have more as I complete my new install. But so far my biggest complaint was that videos did not work out of the box.

Just to be clear I do like VLC. If we can find what is causing the green screen problem it would likely be the best video player. But I know there are other threads indicating this problem. That is why I thought it might be better to install Kplayer or something that seems to have better support. At least from what I am seeing.

VLC works for me, better than any of the alternatives I've tried. Have you tried many different AVIs? Have you tried AVIs that don't come from a camera, or a particular camera?

I vote for keeping kmail.

fargo.. I had the green screen thing. Enable the CR repos, install the VLC from that. Green screen is gone for me.

Thanks. That did work for me. Sorry I didn't try that before I posted. I updated from Debian Media but not CR. Although, oddly enough, I can't seem to open a file from within VLC now. They work fine if I open with VLC from Dolphin. But only the first one loads if I open them from within VLC. But lets not get the thread off topic. I just wanted to give some input hoping to make things work better out of the box. And it looks like VLC might be OK. I just hope that I am the only one having trouble opening additional files from the VLC menu.

Funny, I have never had any issues opening avi and 3gp videos with VLC, and trust me, I get to test all sorts by virtue of my job. In fact, I can't remember it failing to open any video format I have ever thrown at it, except for realvideo, which is so locked down so as to make the video files near on to absolutely useless without their own proprietary player. All .rm files audio plays fine, but no video, though they do provide their own proprietary 32-bit only .deb and rpm files for Linux, which for me, totally puts them out of the ball park because I don't do 32 !

My vote is to set VLC as the default player for all supported files and have a couple of others in spare for the very rare just in case scenarios.

Mike P

I'm pretty sure that the stock M11 VLC can't play MJPEG avi files, which are produced by low-end digital cameras and run about 100 MB/minute for 640x480 24 fps video (huge). They don't have much compression, thus are used on slow hardware which can't spare the CPU cycles for compression. The problem was that the stock VLC 1.1.3 was built against ffmpeg 0.5, and M11 comes with the ffmpeg 0.6 libraries. The CR version was built against the 0.6 version also.

Check the prefs, might be something in there. Good to hear in any case that it works now!