Bug#710754: VLC doesn't play MOV file

[Linda R]

I fixed it, but I still consider it a bug.

Starting it from the visual interface gave no indications of what was wrong.  

Then I started it from the command line.  After searching all over the web, and much trial and error:

In VLC, I switched Tools -> Preferences -> Video -> Output

   from "Default" to "X11 video output (XCB)"

which gave some errors, so I installed, by CPAN, X11::Protocol.pm

Then I followed the instructions here:

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&p=237083

that is,

    Remove any Debian-Multimedia.org entries from the APT sources list via your package manager, or from the command line:

        sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get remove libavutil*

    Reinstall VLC and other packages you are interested in, from the official Debian repositories, e.g.,

        sudo apt-get install vlc
        sudo apt-get install gnome (or whatever it removed)
        sudo apt-get install gimp        "
        sudo apt-get install k3b         "
        sudo apt-get install ...         "

However, I still consider it a bug because there was no error message that gave me a clue.  I had not had any debian-multimedia entries in /etc/apt/sources.list since several versions back of Debian (maybe Debian 5, and my current system is version 7).

The "sudo apt-get remove libavutil*" also removed gnome, gimp, k3b, gnomebaker, vlc and its dependencies, and many other packages!  The removal of so many other packages was quite alarming.  I was lucky that my terminal window kept a large enough scroll buffer that I could capture them.  One by one, I reinstalled them all.

So I would suggest anyone following this to start a script before doing "sudo apt-get remove libavutil*" so you know what you have to restore.

This also reinstalled the earlier version, not the unstable version.

VLC media player 2.0.3 Twoflower (revision 2.0.2-93-g77aa89e)

A few packages were not found, like gnomebaker, but so far I haven't used them.

VLC still appeared not to work after all this, but then I rebooted, and then it worked.  Although whenever I (re)start a video, the VLC window reverts to the small size, but the window corner can later be dragged to stretch it.

I think this is still a bug, because nobody should have to go through all of this.

I still have this error:

[swscaler @ 0x99b3900] No accelerated colorspace conversion found from yuv422p to bgra.