Over time, for some reason, I am unable to play videos in smplayer, totem or vlc if I start the application from the Gnome 3 desktop icon. I use smplayer exclusively but when I lose video with that, I have also lost it in totem and vlc. As I lose video, the first symptom is failure to display if the size is set to 100% and videos must be viewed at 75% and then 50%. Rebooting the computer does nothing. Running smplayer from terminal restores the video capability in all 3 players with any screen size, whether subsequently run from terminal or the desktop icon. Why?

My system is AMD64 with Radeon 4250 graphics. Thanks.

Have you installed firmware-linux & flashplugin-nonfree?
There's also the optio of trying to fglrx-legacy working, which doesn't appreciate certain versions of Xorg.

Yes, I have installed firmware-linux-free, firmware-linux-nonfree, install-flash-player-11-linux.i386 and pepperflashplugin-nonfree. When smplayer, totem and vlc display no video, videos are displayed fine with my browser google-chrome-stable. When smplayer, totem and vlc display no video, sound is played OK. I assume Gnome is somehow corrupting the video codec. Thanks.

Do you have deb-multimedia?
While you say you installed flashplayer-11 did you check to see if you have the latest update? The flashplugin updater doesn't work. It has to be manually updated, because the url hasn't been changed to the update.
Are you able to watch hulu?
I had a heck of a time getting hulu to work

Again, thanks for the response. Yes, I have deb-multimedia in my sources.list. I don't know if my flashplayer is the latest but it is not relevant to this problem. I am trying to watch .mp4 and .webm files in smplayer, totem or vlc. None of these packages depend on flash. The files reside on my hard disk, and/or USB sticks. All were downloaded from youtube via cclive or youtube-dl. I have never tried to watch hulu. I can watch youtube with google-chrome-stable and its pepperflash, and I can, but never do, watch youtube with iceweasel which implies that the libflashplayer.so is working. I can see, but not hear, youtube with midori but I don't care enough to try to diagnose that issue.

how did you install smplayer ?

i have Debian7 on a vm ( KDE ) desktop -- i HATE gnome3
opened the gui package manager
put a check in Smplayer

it installed and videos passed through from a partition play just fine

I installed smplayer sometime in 2013 from a root terminal with 'apt-get install smplayer'. It works perfectly for weeks and then the displayed video size is reduced. It is then stable for a period of days and the size is reduced again. More days and the size reduces to zero, no video. There is always sound. When there is no video, there is also no video in totem or vlc. At that point, I start smplayer from a user terminal one time and the video is restored to full size and continues that way, even when started from the Gnome desktop icon for some weeks before the cycle is repeated. When smplayer displays video at full size, so does totem and vlc. I also have learned to hate gnome3 and use LXDE on my laptop. This will be my last install of Gnome. Thanks for the reply.