Unmet dependency when installing vlc on ubuntu 14.04

Question

Spent around 4hrs now still can't figure out what is the issue here.

Here is terminal dump :

machine@machine:~$ sudo apt-get install vlc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 vlc : Depends: vlc-nox (= 3.0.0~~git20141116+r58673+31~ubuntu14.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
       Depends: libavcodec55 (>= 6:9.1-1) but it is not installable or
                libavcodec-extra-55 (>= 6:10~~git20131218.b3189af~ubuntu14.04.1) but it is not installable
       Depends: libavutil53 (>= 6:9.1-1) but it is not installable
       Recommends: vlc-plugin-notify (= 3.0.0~~git20141116+r58673+31~ubuntu14.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
       Recommends: vlc-plugin-samba (= 3.0.0~~git20141116+r58673+31~ubuntu14.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
machine@machine:~$ sudo apt-get install libavcodec55
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package libavcodec55 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libavcodec55' has no installation candidate
machine@machine:~$ sudo apt-get install libavutil53
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package libavutil53 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libavutil53' has no installation candidate
machine@machine:~$ 

I am using ubuntu 14.04(trusty) and i tried almost everything but can not get these dependencies resolved

Problem is that dependency is shown for libraries which are not available.PLEASE HELP in resolving this.Thanks!

PS : My askubuntu account is not working for some backend account mismatch, thats why i asked on SO

It's a NightMare :\

Answer 1

Apparently there was some third party PPA installed, i solved using below sequnce of commands in terminal :

remove 3rd party PPAs

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mc3man-trusty-media-trusty*

then remove PPA added for VLC (if any)

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/videolan-master-daily*

update

sudo apt-get update

install VLC :

sudo apt-get install vlc

Reference : Link

---

then i stumbled upon another issue, VLCSub (inbuilt utility of subtitle downloader for VLC) was not working in this version of VLC, so i removed all the installed stuff above through :

sudo apt-get purge vlc

and then ran these commands for VLCSub compatible VLC (this is outdated, see edit below)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:djcj/vlc-stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc

Reference : Link

---

EDIT (Updated on 7th July 2015)

so , djcj/vlc-stable is doomed, here is how i updated in my latest ubuntu installation for 14.04 :

for version 2.2.1

sudo apt-get remove vlc vlc-plugin-*  #remove any vlc data /  plugin

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-*

Reference : Link

..... don't forget to add VLSub for pleasant subtitle download experience :)

Answer 2

I was using ppa:djcj/vlc-stable, but it seems to have disappeared. The last few software updates were complaining that it couldn't find files.

I removed this PPA, and tried a few other PPAs that I found using a Google search, but nothing worked. I kept getting the same/similar errors as above.

I finally tried the following command:

sudo apt-get purge vlc-* # include the hyphen

It successfully removed vlc-data. After that, I was able to install and run VLC with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

This worked very well for me:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install aptitude
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install vlc