Out of the box, Totem in my Slackware 10 installation doesn't seem to be able to handle the same files as my old Mandrake 9.2 installation (on my secondary box). When I try to open Xvid files and windows media files, they just quit instantly in Slackware.

So I got around to installing MPlayer (make and make install and all that) and after a little playing around, I got it to work--more or less.
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gui --enable-smb and copying ALL the codecs into /usr/lib/local/codecs seemed to make it happy. I also linked the codecs to /usr/lib/codecs for good measure.

After installing MPlayer, XVID seemed to start working in Totem but WMV and MPG had issues. I then proceeded to change the file associations in Gnome for my media files to open in Mplayer and while I haven't been able to get a nice seek bar working it does work, However, I am unable stream files directly over SMB in MPlayer.

Anyway, here are my questions:

-How can I "fix" the Totem media playback? Is there a particular folder I can place the Mplayer codecs in to make them work with Totem?

-How can I tell Gnome that Mplayer can actually play files over SMB? How do I play files from SMB in mplayer via the console?

-How can I fix audio/video sync issues? XVID audio/video seem to be off by just barely enough to notice that the lips aren't quite moving in sync.

--Thanks

-How can I "fix" the Totem media playback? Is there a particular folder I can place the Mplayer codecs in to make them work with Totem?

Not sure if this is correct or not, but I think totem is a frontent for xine and hence uses different codecs to mplayer. (somebody correct me). I always install the w32codecs (just search for that in google or maybe even on linuxpackages.net) and seem to have no troubles playing anything much.

-How can I tell Gnome that Mplayer can actually play files over SMB? How do I play files from SMB in mplayer via the console?
not sure sorry.

-How can I fix audio/video sync issues? XVID audio/video seem to be off by just barely enough to notice that the lips aren't quite moving in sync.

might have to find the control for it in the player you use. from memory in mplayer they are [ and ] but i don't have mplayer on here to check, just mplayer --help.
i just looked and looks like totem doesn't have them. i know kaffeine does (another frontend to xine). i like kaffeine.

Yes, Totem is based on the xine multimedia player.

Yes Totem is based on Xine but the W32/Win32 codecs you mentioned appear to be the same codec pack required by MPlayer. I have those codecs in /usr/local/lib/codecs and that keeps MPlayer happy. Where does Totem/Xine look for these codecs? You said you installed them. Where to?