You can get 0.8.6 either from svn and compile it yourself, or from the nightly builds (
http://nightlies.videolan.org) but these can be unstable as they are in constant development.
There have been some problems with autoplay in firefox not working (
viewtopic.php?t=16611) but they seemed to be fixed in the latest nightlies. With autoplay off, you get the black box with "no picture" as you describe. One way to get around this is to have play/stop buttons (or links) to manually control the video.
The following html code works for me (find it also at
http://web.mit.edu/alecr/www/cwf/vlc-simple.html):
Code: Select all
<embed type="application/x-vlc-plugin"
name="video1" width="720" height="352"
target="http/mkv://web.mit.edu/alecr/www/cwf/trailer.mkv"/>
<a href="javascript:null();" onclick='document.video1.play()'>play</a>
Additional commands are covered in the vlc help page:
http://www.videolan.org/doc/play-howto/ ... l#id293936. Also try that plugin test page to test that things are working in general.