Some abortive attempts to play videos (.avi) in Senryu/Haiku on the EeePC 901

I dragged over a small .avi video from Ubuntu to Senryu (and also to Haiku) and dropped it into the VLC MediaPlayer.
Although the sound worked fine, no video showed.
This post to the Haikuware/Senryu page shows in more detail what I did.
No solution yet but there are a few other codecs that it might be worthwhile trying (although it's not clear how some of them are to be installed).
It's a bit surprising to find, though, that nobody really seems to have looked into getting video to work in Haiku on the EeePC 901.