Kaffeine + AVI files but different

[jeanr0x]

Okay, firstly I have to say this forum (and dare I say) the ubuntu forum has helped me immensely with the transition to Linux-Kubuntu.
Great community you have here, as I have had to learn everything about setting up my machine to run Kubuntu. Great Job and Thanks. Even the wife does not miss windows!!

But I'm really stuck now and I need some help.
I'm running Gutsy on an intel machine and everything was running the way it should be, and then I go and add Kino the video editting program
to my system. Kino did not run properly when I started it, so I found out that I was missing some of it's dependencies (even thou I installed
it through Add/Remove programs). So I installed those files through adept manager. Tried to run Kino again, and it froze again. So I rebooted
and found out some other things happened too. Kaffeine would not play any avi file I had. I would click on an avi file and the Kaffeine icon
would bounce beside the cursor, and the spinning hourglass on the taskbar would be displayed, and then it would all disappear. I would do it again and the same thing would happen. I can play the avi file with mplayer no problem, and the VLC player will only play the audio part of my camera's avi file, but will play all other avi files fine. After a reboot, kaffeine will be opened and at full screen with it's menu options.
Kaffeine will play DVD's, mpegs etc etc no problem, but as soon as I click on an avi file, it disappears, and will not open DVDs and mpegs either. The other thing that happens at this point is that my screen saver will not turn on after the set idle time. But after a reboot, Kaffeine is ready at the menu screen, and my screen saver will work as normal, as long as I don't open Kaffeine on an avi file. I can't say for sure if the VLC player used to play my camera's avi file as I was happy to let Kaffeine be the default player. I've removed Kino, and added it again, and it didn't help, so I've left it off my machine. Then I removed and reinstalled Kaffeine (twice) but I still got the same problems with the avi files.
Let the challenge begin.
Thanks in advance.

PS I picked Kino, (as I read here) that Kdenlive and dvgrap3 do not work well, and you need to downgrade dvgrap2.0, and people had trouble doing this so I did not want to go there.

PPS I will only be around late evenings.

[mchuskie]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

AVI is not, contrary to popular belief, an A/V codec in itself; rather, it is a container format in which you can store video together with audio in a variety of different formats.

That VLC does not play the video part suggests the video codec is something rather obscure that VLC does not know how to play. Mplayer obviously does have the codec. Kaffeine, it seems, gets scared and runs away...

I haven't used Kino but I have used Kdenlive a little, without problems.

[jeanr0x]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Thanks JamesM,
But the weird thing is before I installed Kino, everything worked great. All players played everything. Could installing Kino have corrupted Kaffeine's settings?

[randcoop]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Please make sure that you have libxine1-x installed. A similar thing happened to me when I installed something else and aptitude said that program wasn't being used and would be removed. Next thing I knew, Kaffeine was showing the same symptoms as you describe.

If libxine1-x is not installed, install it and see if that helps.

[jeanr0x]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Bummer, I have it installed.
I was hoping this was an easy fix, but it appears not to be that way.
Thanks randcoop

[randcoop]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Sorry it didn't help. Obviously, something changed when you installed Kino, but I don't know what it is. Did you try purging Kino when you removed it? Remember that purge is more complete than simple removal. My suggestion would be to purge both Kino and Kaffeine and then to install Kaffeine.

[b0uncyfr0]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Thats the downside/beauty to linux. You fix one thing to find out that something else is broken, but thats what makes it so interesting to use.

I had similar problem where i installed something( cant remember what) and rebooted to find all of my codecs gone, like stripped down to the bone.

[jeanr0x]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Alright.
You made me work for this one.
I purged Kaffeine and Kino ( thank you forum ) It found nothing for Kino, and it removed two extra files for Kaffeine (-xine, -mozilla)
I did a reboot, and after, I reinstalled Kaffeine. Same problems. But now a new one, all my sound files (mp3 and flac) files sound a little screechy when playing with amarok or vlc player.

So I might just give up, and wait for Hardy Heron, and do a complete reinstall, and use Gutsy as a learning experience.
Thanks for the help.

[randcoop]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

I wonder if you've got hardware problems. It doesn't make much sense that purging Kaffeine and then re-installing it would break VLC and/or Amarok (more possible for Amarok because it uses xine engine). VLC works completely differently than Kaffeine.

Have you tried playing these files under Windows? How about playing them with a different distro (you can use a Live CD to not affect your installation)?

[jeanr0x]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Wow, it doesn't take long to fall back on the forum.
Hey randcoop thanks for everything, I tried the sound files with windows and everything is good. What ever I've done. I've done it good in Linux
Thanks for the help

[KeithZG]

Re: Kaffeine + AVI files but different

Just in case you haven't tried any of the following:

-Make sure every libxine-blahblahetc package is installed. As far as I've ever experienced they don't actually interfere with eachother, but sometimes one that you wouldn't think you need will somehow solve all your problems. I like Xine but it's often like using black magic to play A/V (at least to me).

-Try KPlayer, it's a much better (and obviously KDE-centric) frontend for MPlayer, plus you have a lot of options to change up the backend of it (I'd play around with what sound driver it uses under the "audio" setting, that might be a good way to troubleshoot where the actual problem occurs if it isn't actually Xine that's causing the problem). Furthermore, you can cross-reference that with Kaffeine's settings for the Video and Audio outputs/codecs (go into Settings -> xine engine parameters) and see if perhaps there's some change in settings that would make Kaffeine/Xine work like Mplayer seems to.

To be perfectly honest I've been dismayed with how Kaffeine has acted since I upgraded to Gutsy (back a month before release for my laptop, and just a few days ago finally on my fast desktop). There have been quite a few new quirks and bugs... one terribly weird one has been that KDE will restart if I'm running a video in Kaffeine from a remote samba share and I close my laptop lid, strange. But yours sounds much more serious yet potentially fixable than that, so definitely don't give up hope Oh, three more things occur to me:

- have you tried running the files in Xine-UI? It'll probably have the same problems but if it doesn't then that tells us a lot!

- do you have universe/multiverse repositories enabled?

- try running "sudo apt-get autoremove", in case somehow it's some dependency of Kino that is causing this and yet it hasn't been uninstalled for whatever reason.