I have a cheap e-Machines laptop - a D620 - running ubuntu 8.10. I'm using Gnome and have installed very little beyond the defaults. For some reason, no movies play on my computer at all. They start, but after the movie player appears initially, it just exits. Same results with mpeg & avi. Sometimes I get audio while it's playing, but no picture.
Initially I thought the problem was with Totem, I have tried VLC and mplayer, nothing works. Any advice on how to even begin troubleshooting this would be appreciated.
Carls idea to run the movie player in Terminal was great! I didn't know you could do that. When I googled that error I found out that I could run mplayer with extra arguments line this: mplayer -vo x11 -zoom -framedrop file.avi
This worked perfectly, & all my movies play with mplayer.