Debian 5.0 Lenny

I moved over from Ubuntu 9.04 to Debian 5.0 recently. It was not because I did not like Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu is simply great and it has made Linux as user friendly as Windows. But I faced problems in compiling and installing some scientific packages. Hence, I had to move over to Debian. Moreover, I had been using Debian for a long time (nearly 4 years) before switching to Ubuntu. I am quite happy to be back to Debian. The current version 5.0 is certainly better than its predecessors. GUI functions are more stable. I have all the ingredients necessary for my work. I really don't worry about having latest packages as long as the current package is stable and it works. On this aspect, I faced trouble with Ubuntu sometimes. I am planning keep updating my readers about the problems I faced with Debian 5.0 and how to get around them.

Today, I would talk about the problem of VLC player not showing the video. It happened because of debian-multimedia repository. It upgraded some codes and vlc player stopped displaying video. The solution is to remove the debian-multimedia repository from /etc/apt/sources.list and then do the following :

$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-get remove  ffmpeg libavcodec51 libavdevice52 libavformat52 libavutil49 libpostproc51 libswscale0
$ apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec51 libavdevice52 libavformat52 libavutil49 libpostproc51 libswscale0


$ apt-get install vlc


After this, your VLC player should work normally. It worked for me.