
Such error is probably caused by outdated VLC versions. However, you may sometimes encounter VLC not playing Xvid encoded files issue.

Usually, VLC can play Xvid files without any additional software.

Xvid encoded videos can be decoded with all ASP-compliant decoders and players, such as the libavcodec-based VLC Media Player. Video encoded with Xvid is MPEG-4 ASP video, and it is mainly stored in the AVI container. Xvid (formerly "XviD") is not a video container format like MP4, but a video compression format (codec) for compressing video to and decompressing video from the MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) format.
