vlc on intrepid, no video

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) on laptops at home. I also installed vlc (well, on one computer vlc was already installed on Hardy and I just dist-upgraded). I would see no video but could hear sound. Some googling a week or so ago didn't help.

Today though I found this:

cannot play any video (SOLVED) on the videolan forums.

That solved the problem perfectly. The solution being, at the command line, to run:

vlc --reset-plugins-cache --reset-config

Linked to here so that its google karma will rise (not that it needs it, since it's already the first result :-).