Anybody play a video in VLC?

[JohnStodden]

I use VLC on my windows laptop and have found it a great program, so I thought I would try it on the pi.

I have raspbian, and did a sudo apt-get update to get up to date.
Then sudo apt-get install vlc

Then did a startx, opened LXerminal and ran vlc

It came up fine, then I opened a .3gp file

It displayed the first few frames fine (hurrah!) then the video froze while the scrollbar continued to advance at normal speed. Various error messages appeared:
xcv_xv vout display error no available XVideo adaptor
a few lines show audio errors (I am using HMDI to DVI on a monitor, and have no audio)
then
avcodec error decoder error: more than 5 seconds of late video -> dropping frame (computer too slow ?)

Since I believe XBMC displays videos fine, I suspect I should be able to get this running.

If anybody has tried this and can help, please do so.

I am a Linux newbie...

[dom]

Since I believe XBMC displays videos fine, I suspect I should be able to get this running.

No, xmbc (and omxplayer) play video fine as someone spent hundreds of hours modifying it to use the GPU to accelerate the video decode.
VLC won't play videos well until someone does the work needed. (It may be a bit easier as there is code in xbmc/omxplayer that can be copied, but it's still a lot of work).

[mahjongg]

VLC attempts to decode the video's using only the slow 700MHz ARM6 processor, and probably does it even without the hardware floating point support of the processor. So the decoding of a frame takes far too much time to do it in real time.

The PI has a GPU that does the decoding of H.264 video streams in hardware, so those video's can be decoded fast, and in full HD resolution. The decoding of other formats than H.264 isn't possible in hardware, as only for H.264 there is firmware in the GPU. So in fact even when VLC would have built in GPU support, it still would only do H.264 video's using the GPU.

However, a .3GP file is a "container format", and might in fact contain a video stream that is compatible with H.264! In that case it might be possible to extract the video stream and play it with the GPU.

[Ocean20]

I tried VLC with a HDMI-dvi monitor connection. I used to get error message. Then I must have installed some other package and now the video jerks through but no sound. Still working on it.

[jamesh]

Please read previous two messages re: why VLC is slow.