I’ve had lots of trouble since migrating to openSUSE with playing video files of nearly any kind. Running it in the terminal just results in errors usually including something like x11 video output error: X11 request 141.19 failed with error code 11:
BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

openSUSE is using the great radeonhd driver and at one point I understood that maybe installing the proprietary fglrx drivers from ATI would solve the problem. Don’t do this. I got slow screen fades and had to rescue my system and manually remove the RPM packages. The fact that I fixed it so easily was heartening.

But I was back to square one. No links I found provided any helpful info- they just said to turn off Compiz Desktop Effects. That is stupid. Of course it works then, but I don’t want to have to turn it off! Suddenly I remembered running into something similar in Ubuntu when I first installed 8.10 Intrepid. In that case the video flickered. But for me it turned out the same thing fixed it. Run:

gstreamer-properties

Hit the Video tab. Click the Video tab. Under Default Video Plugin select “X Window System (No Xv)”. Click Test to verify that video playback is working. The aforementioned post also provides the instructions for vlc which uses a different video mechanism.