MPEG Video Player Not Working

[classica1232]

I downloaded VLC and have been trying to use it to change my .m4v videos to MPEG-2 so that Rockbox can play them. I originally transcoded an Evanescence music video; the player came up, but would only show a blank screen with the player controls on the bottom. It refused to play the video, though recognized it as an accepted file type.

I tried transcoding a different music video just to double-check everything, and now the MPEG Player says "unsupported file format" even though the video is indeed compatible. I transcoded both videos as MPEG2 Video with MPEG-PS encapsulation, which (from what I gleaned reading the wiki page) is correct.

Has anyone else had this problem? If you have used VLC with success, could you describe the steps? I posted this topic because the VLC manual has not helped, nor has the MPEG Player plug-in wiki page, or the forums. Many topics simply said, "Go to the wiki." For many, that seemed to work, but I am too technologically illiterate to understand the instructions given therein. Forgive me for my incompetence.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks to all who reply for their time and patience.

EDIT: I just tried again, this time converting the video and audio (I had not converted the audio) of the Evanescence    video. Now it will recognize the file, but the screen is dead blank. It's lit up and on, but there's nothing but black. I found one post describing this, and it seems as if this is some sort of bug that had been fixed. Any suggestions?
Post Merge: April 13, 2012, 09:16:35 PMI just realized I posted this in the completely wrong forum. Can someone move it to Plug-ins / Viewers?

[AlexP]

Are you resizing the video to the screen resolution of your player as well?

[classica1232]

I thought about that, but I can't find the option in VLC to do it. A little help, VLC users?

[AlexP]

No idea, but you need to do that for sure.

[knifethrower]

If you are on Windows or Linux you might want to try WinFF instead. It's a video converter GUI front-end for FFMpeg and I believe that it has presets for Rockbox encoding included.

[Chronon]

There's a way to do it with VLC from the command line.  See the PluginMpegplayer on the wiki.