Video playing in Linux under ESXi?

[doron1]

This has to be a stupid question, but I haven't figured it out yet:

I have a Linux guest under ESXi 5.5. When I try to play video, with any video playing program, I get a black window. No video is playing. The program seems to be working fine, and seems to think it's playing the video, but nothing is seen on the console.

Tried vlc, mplayer, with various sources. Black window.

Tried Debian, CentOS. All the same: Black window.

Windows guest, under the same ESXi, plays video perfectly.

Any help/insight would be appreciated!

[Linjo]

How are you connecting to the display? With the vSphere console? VNC? X? NoNX?

// Linjo

[doron1]

vShpere Client. Sorry I wasn't clear about that.

EDIT: Since you asked, I got curious and tried with VNC. So, I do get video in VNC. I do not get it in the vSphere client. (A WIndows guest does get it in the vSphere client).

vnc is not a good match for my setup so it's not an optimal solution. I do wonder about the difference though.