I'm trying to write movie playback into my engine, and I started with avifile, as per the NeHe example, but it has a few issues. Currently it either refuses to decode files at all because the codec isn't installed, or thinks the file is missing a picture start code.

Seeing as avifile ceased development five years ago, is there anything newer that people use these days?

Perhaps ffmpeg's libavformat and libavcodec would work?

The most common libraries for media playback under Linux (I can not speak for the Unixes) are ffmpeg and gstreamer. If you aim to cover the spectrum of hardware Linux runs on (especially tablets, phones, netbooks, and so on) you need to stick to gstreamer because that's the only media playback library that gets love from hardware acceleration (if any) present.

Thanks guys. This is for Linux (specifically Ubuntu) but other distros remain a possibility, so I'll check gstreamer out.

EDIT: Drat, I should have guessed from the name, but GStreamer uses GObject. FFMpeg it is then!