How to install ATI mobility radeon 9700 drivers

**Mortesins93** · October 5th, 2010

Hello,
I have a Xubuntu 9.10 which works pretty fine, the only problem I have is watching videos through VLC or mplayer. If I try watching a video I get a black screen instead of the video, even though the sound works. The only way I can see something is by using Avidemux. If I try opening the file with mplayer I get this "Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (vo) device." If I try typing "mplayer -vo gl movie.avi" in the terminal the video works, why? What does the option "-vo gl" do?
Another problem I have is playing, through wine, some Windows games. If I try launching a game through wine I get a black screen even though I can hear the game working. Then if I press Alt+F1 I can see the tty1 and after typing "sudo pkill wine" I can go back to the desktop environment.
Could installing the video card drivers help? How do I do it? I tried going to Applications>System>Hardware Drivers but nothing shows up.
Thanks in advance.
I hope you can help me.

**Mark Phelps** · October 5th, 2010

There are no current AMD proprietary drivers that will work with your card and current versions of Ubuntu. AMD (formerly, ATI) dropped proprietary driver support for your card a long time ago.

The only working drivers now are the open-source drivers and they are installed by default during initial setup.

So basically, you already have the only working drivers installed.

**Mortesins93** · October 6th, 2010

Ok, thank you very much. So my problem isn't the video card drivers. Have you got a clue on what I try to do to solve it?

**Mark Phelps** · October 7th, 2010

Can't help you with Wine. Don't use it. Found it to be a waste of time when I tried it a while back.

As to the black screen, that generally means you're missing a video codec. Have you installed ubuntu-restricted-extras ?