When I started kaffine and totem the first time after a new install of openSuSE 10.2 they both informed me I was missing libdvdcss and win32 codecs. I went out and found both...
...after unpacking libdvdcss I read the install file which said to do the standard ./configure, make and make install...no warnings or errors after those three steps. After running make install it told me the necessary files were stored in /usr/local/lib.

...running the below command for the win32 codecs (ran it twice)...

linux-2wrl:~ # rpm -i w32codec-all-20061022-0.pm.0.i586.rpm
warning: w32codec-all-20061022-0.pm.0.i586.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 3ab2ce5e
package w32codec-all-20061022-0.pm.0 is already installed

after installing these two files I tried to open an mpg file and received the following from both apps:
Kaffine:
No plugin found to handle this resoure (filename.mpg).

Totem:
Totem could not play this file (filename.mpg)
You do not have a decoder installed to handle this file.
You might need to install the necessary plugin.

Do I need to point those two apps to the files I installed?...
or why isnt totem and kaffine able to play mpg...???

Check which backend Totem and Kaffeine use. Both of those are merely front-ends (i.e. don't play anything on their own, but need to have a backend player to do the job). I assume the backend is Xine, but it could be gstreamer. Difficult to say if w32codecs help, but for Xine you can install it's extra librareis which should be able to handle most multimedia formats (including mp3, mpeg, wmv, wma, ...) I'm not a SuSE user (and not going to be anymore, thanks to MS) so I'm not sure what it calls the package which has the needed extra libs; on Fedora Core the package is called xine-libs-extras-nonfree (or close to that) and on Debian it's called libxine-extracodecs. Try to dig your package manager for something resembling either of those, install that package and re-try. Or if you found out the players are using gstreamer as their backend, don't install Xine libs (of course) but instead install gstreamer-plugins-ugly (and if you find, other names instead of 'ugly'). That ought to help. I hope your libdvdcss2 is working since you got no errors; you'll notice it when playing commercial DVD movies -- some of them might not play at all unless you have libdvdcss2.

Try out installing Xine's extra libs package or Gstreamer's plugin packages. I guess it's Xine, but who knows

Use the multimedia setup proposed by jem report. It's almost the default for Suse 10.x series.
Swerdna