I have a newly installed Debian. DVDs and video files won't play. For audio only, I can play music CDs, .wav, .flac, and .mp3. When playing .avi, .mpg, or a DVD, I can get audio but the video is nothing but black with some purple vertical stripes. When playing .mov, I get the same video problem and no audio. I installed totem-gstreamer and all the gstreamer plugins, and xine. I get the same results with either program. The first frame of each .avi/.mpg file does appear when I browse my home directory folder. Changing from 1152x864@24bpp to 1024x768@24bpp made no difference. The video card is a S3 Savage2000 64meg AGP. The kernel is 2.6.8.

try installing and using mplayer. It is much more capable than xine/totem. If you run it from the command line without succes it'll at least output a pretty effective error message too.