If you have problems (i.e. blank or green screen or the error “main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `XVID’” in vlc) viewing XviD videos in Debian Lenny and you are using debian-multimedia repository then here is how to solve temporarily the problem.

What we are going to do now is to downgrade the minimum set of libraries for restoring vlc/totem capability to play videos. In addition we will tell apt-get not to upgrade those libraries next time we run apt-get upgrade. The latter is just temporary, as hopefully the problem will be solved in a few days weeks (months?).

Here is the two simple commands: