Well, without knowing the particular distro+version and version of FFmpeg involved (is it the repo version or the Debian-unstable package/self-built...this matters, a lot - although Ubuntu 15.04 will have a proper and up-to-date FFmpeg package again) or how the input file was encoded (aside from it being in an Ogg container), I can only assume that the file itself has an issue. There's several variables that can affect it. The thing is, VLC is a mixed system - it ostensibly uses libavcodec/format/util/etc. from FFmpeg or Libav, but it also has several of its own libraries* to handle specific formats and also doesn't necessarily expose every format from the libav* libraries for playback (
AviSynth scripts are a notable one that VLC refuses to play, even though libavformat supports them). If you want a much more 1:1 relationship with FFmpeg's playback abilities, then you should use
mpv.
*not that FFmpeg doesn't support external libraries either, but if you're dealing with VLC it's tacking on libraries that FFmpeg doesn't have access to, so conversion wouldn't work the same way.
And yes, I should probably have mentioned that -an disables the audio. If you actually need the audio during editing, I'd suggest converting it to PCM:
Code:
ffmpeg -i input -vcodec ffv1 -acodec pcm_s16le output.avi
What I'd suggest, since it appears the source file might have problems, is that you can remux the streams from Ogg into Matroska, and then use the MKV file to see if that resolves FFmpeg's issue (FFmpeg itself can do the remuxing, but if there's an FFmpeg-specific issue with it, that may not be a good idea; for MKV, it's best to use mkvtoolnix).
Code:
mkvmerge -o "output.mkv" "input.ogg"
ffmpeg -i "output.mkv" -vcodec ffv1 -acodec pcm_s16le "output.avi"
mkvmerge might also be more specific about what's wrong with the file, if it can't handle it either. I normally use the
upstream PPA for mkvtoolnix (on the Downloads page), as the one in the Ubuntu repos is several versions behind.
There's also the point that lossless formats simply take more hardware power (nearly exclusively on the CPU) to play back than lossy formats do, and lossless formats aren't really intended for real-time playback as such. My suggestion to use ffv1 was primarily to save disk space, but ffv1 takes longer to encode and decode than some other lossless formats, which is why I also mentioned ffvhuff. ffvhuff should be faster on encode and decode (decode speed is important for when you're in the editing program), but the tradeoff is that it'll produce larger files.
I'll also admit that it's been years since I've played with Cinelerra, and back then (ca. 2006) I didn't care much for it. But I cut my teeth on Adobe Premiere, so that's understandable. I've been waiting for
Lumiera to come to fruition, as it seems like it may be better attuned to stuff like that. If I had to do editing on Linux in the meanwhile, I probably would use AviSynth as the more complex NLE it actually is, whether I'd have to do it under Wine and pipe out to native FFmpeg for rendering, or in the limited capabilities of AvxSynth (the porting effort to get AviSynth+ cross-platform is going rather slowly, but once it can be built natively on non-Windows, it'll fully eclipse AvxSynth).
