VLC video not working

[dbaker]

preliminaries: my version of VLC is whatever is in the Saucy repos. I can't get any other version (see the last paragraph in this post)

I used to use VLC for playing videos, but I switched to Kaffeine as I like some of its features and it doesn't crash randomly like VLC does (unless you try to play wmvs...which I don't!)
I've continued to use VLC for playing plain audio files without any problems. As I find the default VLC interface rather ugly I installed a few skins and until today was using one.
It started to annoy me because I have my close/minimise/maximise buttons on the left (like OS X) and the skin didn't, and also the order of the playback buttons, etc wasn't customisable. So today I opened up VLC, switched back to the default interface and customised the buttons to my liking, modified a few hotkeys, and played some MP3s. All good.

I then tried to play an MP4 video. The audio worked, but the image didn't update, staying 'stuck' on the first frame. I closed VLC and tried again; this time I just got a black screen, no image at all.

A google search shows this problem seems to be pretty common, but none of the answers I was able to find have helped at all. I tried uninstalling and purging VLC, then reinstalling it; resetting preferences; I saw one solution that involved installing the kubuntu restricted extras package, so I tried that. Nothing helped. VLC used to play videos just fine (including when I was using a skin), so I'm not sure what happened.

I wanted to download the latest version of VLC from the website, but it's an 'apt link' (or whatever they're called) which asks to be opened with an application. I can never use those things cause the window that pops up for choosing an application just provides a file browser, rather than a list of apps to choose from. (Maybe I'm being daft here? how does this work?)

[Teunis]

I'm not sure what the problem with VLC is on your computer but it seems the purge was not complete.
Until a solution is found I would recommend smplayer as an alternative.

[dbaker]

I don't need an alternative, I have Kaffeine. I just decided I'd like to try VLC again, mostly cause the interface is customisable.
I've tried every video player in the repos and Kaffeine and VLC are the only ones I've liked/that have worked.

UPDATE: I have some more information, but I'm not sure it will help.

I discovered VLC will happily play an MP4 I downloaded from youtube (using youtube-dl I think), yet weird stuff is going on with some other MP4s I have on my system.

I have to download recorded lectures for uni which are in WMV format. Since I've been using Kaffeine and Kaffeine doesn't like WMVs, I convert them all to MP4 using avconv. I've never had any trouble playing these converted files in Kaffeine; I can't remember if I've ever tried playing them in VLC before.

Running VLC from the command line with the -v option and trying to play any of these lecture videos, I get hundreds of errors like this:
[HTML][0x7f3a80004368] main video output warning: picture is too late to be displayed (missing 2423 ms)
[0x7f3a9dda6e88] avcodec decoder error: more than 5 seconds of late video -> dropping frame (computer too slow ?)[/HTML]
This goes on for the entire video and the picture effectively never updates. The original WMVs, on the other hand, seem to work.

Could there be something wrong with avconv? Whenever I convert anything with it I see hundreds of errors, but the resulting MP4s work fine in Kaffeine, so I've always ignored the errors.

[Teunis]

There is an issue with ffmpeg, it has been removed from 14.04 and replaced with something 'libav'.
In my case it means Kradio can no longer play aac streams but mp3 still works fine.

Could it be ffmpeg has been depreciated or even replaced on 13.10?

[dbaker]

yes, ffmpeg is deprecated, avconv is what we have to use instead. I don't understand what impact this has on my issue though...