mplayer fatal error !?

[mmac72]

Hi I installed few days ago kubuntu 6.1 on my Inspiron 8200.
When I try to open a clip with mplayer I get this message.

Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.

I tried to uninstall and reinstall it, I added the windows codecs, but still nothing changes.
Does anyone has an idea?
Thanks
Marco

[Forester]

Re: mplayer fatal error !?

Hi,

Been through to same rigmarole myself today. See the man page for mplayer / gmplayer.

I found that from the command line gmplayer -vo x11 worked for me. The default video output (vx) isn't valid on my installation (don't ask why). The one that works may not be optimal either but the man page is 5000 lines long !

The man page says you can set the default in conf file - either the system one in /etc or the personal one in ~/.mplayer. For me the line

vo x11

should work but it doesn't. Don't know why. So I kluged the KDE interface instead ...

In the Mulitmedia section of the KDE menu, right click on the mplayer entry and select Edit Item.
On the right of the window that appears look for the label Command. The box to right of this should read gmplayer. Change this to read gmplayer -vo x11. Make sure the x is not the capital letter X.

There may be better ways of doing this but heck, I only installed kubunut 2 days ago and that was to prove that my new DVD writer did not work under Windows only because Windows sucks. VLC worked fine without trouble, mplayer needed manual configuration, kaffeine was sulky - still tends to play video without sound. Only devede to go but that won't even start up.