Arch Linux

ivi3

Member

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 62

vlc doesn't play H264 movies (matroska) [Solved]

Hi @all,

back on arch with my laptop and I'm really enjoying the speed compared to debian!
And now arch supports full encrypted installations it is the perfect distro for me again.

Installation and configuring went smooth so far but now I have a little problem:
vlc can't play some video files which have the h264 codec. Mplayer and xine are playing the files just fine.
This is what vlc tells me:

[00000289] main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `avc1'.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.
[00000266] main playlist: stopping playback

This ist the mplayer output:

Matroska file format detected.
VIDEO:  [avc1]  704x480  24bpp  23.976 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)

Last edited by ivi3 (2007-08-10 14:13:20)

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: vlc doesn't play H264 movies (matroska) [Solved]

Lately most 'VLC won't play XYZ format' problems are solved by rebuilding it on the client computer.

ivi3

Member

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 62

Re: vlc doesn't play H264 movies (matroska) [Solved]

Rebuilding solved the problem. Thx!!!

MrWeatherbee

Member

Registered: 2007-08-01

Posts: 287

Re: vlc doesn't play H264 movies (matroska) [Solved]

Thanks, skottish.

Add me to the list (a list I wasn't aware of until now) of people who have fixed VLC issues by re-building. I couldn't get VLC from the repos to play .flv files, among others, until I rebuilt. Now everything is fine.

Wonder why this is necessary?

Anyway, thanks again.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: vlc doesn't play H264 movies (matroska) [Solved]

Wonder why this is necessary?

My best guess is FFMPEG. If you look at the dependencies for FFMPEG, you'll see that it spreads out through all sorts of different areas of Linux. If you upgrade X11, it may subtly break FFMPEG because of it's dependence on SDL. If you upgrade glibc, it may have an effect on zlib. And of course all of the multimedia dependencies...