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Im using a an Acer Aspire Revo R1600 and for some odd reason with this new version of Ubuntu i can't play .MKV files anywhere. I have always had flawless playback but now im getting a weird message from the video player.

"Could not find GStreamer caps mapping for FFmpeg codec 'h264', and you are using an external libavcodec. This is most likely due to a packaging problem and/or libavcodec having been upgraded to a version that is not compatible with this version of gstreamer-ffmpeg. Make sure your gstreamer-ffmpeg and libavcodec packages come from the same source/repository."

I tried installing the restricted extras and playing it back in VLC but in VLC i just get a green picture and thats all.

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Installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and running vlc was all I ever needed to do. –  Capt.Nemo Oct 16 '11 at 0:27

4 Answers 4

up vote 0 down vote accepted

try reinstalling the gstreamer plugins

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how does one do this? I tried apt-get remove gstreamer0.10-plugins- and then install them again, but this didn't solve the issue. –  axel22 May 31 '12 at 19:30
this does not solves the issue.. video plays fine in VLC and but in TOTEM it is giving this error. –  AurA Apr 14 '13 at 16:17

Thanks for everyones advice, basically what was going on is that the video that i was trying to open was toooooo biigggg for my computer to handle (resolution) im running a 1.6 Intel Atom Processor, and apparently i can't do 1080p so basically it was an internal codec error cause my processor could process the video, thanks anyways guys

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That is incorrect. This error is related to bug #879066. Whether your computer can actually handle the file you are trying to play or not is unrelated.

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Agreed with @NCLI. I ran into this problem when playing an MKV file that was encoded with 10 bit codec.

I installed mplayer2/smplayer from this repository https://launchpad.net/~ripps818/+archive/coreavc and then viewing it in smplayer worked.

Here's a quick video showing the istallation steps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMg3MSW0O8k and a sample 10 bit encoded video viewed

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protected by Community Oct 29 '11 at 23:17


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