VLC media player problem with Xubuntu 7.10

Im having a major issue with video playback on my computer( P3 with 500mhz running xubuntu 7.10)

I installed the vlc package last week, and occasionally could get a video to play entirely...or up to the part of a movie, etc. What would happen half of the time is the file would open in vlc, the vlc window would pop up, the black screen would be there, i could hear the first second of audiom then vlc would close by itself.

but it would occasionally work.


now it wont work at all. I only had one brief success where I got one movie file to load and play perfectly but once i closed vlc, then tried to re open it 5 minutes later to play the same video file, it went back to its old tricks.

The single occurence above happened after i uninstalled and reinstalled vlc and installed the libdevcss2 file from the synaptic library.

oh, also, when i installed and tried mplayer, i received the message "gnome_screensaver_control()" which i researched; my researched concluded that unchecking this box relating to the screensaver. but that didnt work after that.

anybody have any suggestions? i have a total of 4 video players on my computer and none of them work. I know that vlc works, because it has, but now it doesnt.