do you have dma enabled on your drive? look up hdparm.

Its not his system. I'm running xine on:
Pentium II 350Mhz
Nvidia Rage 128
768 MB SDRAM
KDE 3.7 on Fedora Core 3

If my system can take it, so can his (xine runs perfectly!). The only prob lem is the RAM at ic_torres machine.
Torres, try this:
Run an alternative x-window system with minimum specs (shut down servers, cron, atd gpg sshagent etc etc). There should be a X rescue console called twm appart from your kde or gnome gui, use that (just a console under X). RAM usage should be confined to a minimum.
Now run xine. Has it become any faster? If yes, you need to do is upgrade your RAM another 256 Megs (costs about 80 Euros/70$ in Greece). Expensive, but you can reuse the RAM in your next computer...
Alternatively you could search the web for some older version of xine. Might be bugy, but it should use less memory.

This is what I was thinking, considering you mentioned vcd's being the problem. how does xine perform with a file that is located on your harddrive or streaming across the 'net? Most likely with the rest of your specs I would guess dma is not enabled on your cdrom drive.

guys guys... here is what you ask :

hdparm :

root@darkstar:~# hdparm /dev/cdrom

/dev/cdrom:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 1 (on)
readahead = 8 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument
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xine - check

***********************************
bash-3.00$ xine-check
Please be patient, this script may take a while to run...
[ good ] you're using Linux, doing specific tests
[ good ] looks like you have a /proc filesystem mounted.
[ good ] You seem to have a reasonable kernel version (2.4.31)
[ good ] intel compatible processor, checking MTRR support
[ good ] you have MTRR support and there are some ranges set.
[ good ] found the player at /usr/bin/xine
[ good ] /usr/bin/xine is in your PATH
[ good ] found /usr/bin/xine-config in your PATH
[ good ] plugin directory /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.0.2 exists.
[ good ] found unknown plugin: xineplug_flac.so
[ good ] found input plugins
[ good ] found demux plugins
[ good ] found decoder plugins
[ good ] found video_out plugins
[ good ] found audio_out plugins
[ good ] skin directory /usr/share/xine/skins exists.
[ good ] found logo in /usr/share/xine/skins
[ good ] I even found some skins.
[ good ] /dev/cdrom points to /dev/hdd
[ good ] /dev/dvd points to /dev/hdd
[ good ] DMA is enabled for your DVD drive
[ good ] found xvinfo: X-Video Extension version 2.2
[ good ] your Xv extension supports YV12 overlays (improves MPEG performance)
[ good ] your Xv extension supports YUY2 overlays
[ good ] Xv ports: YUY2 YV12 UYVY I420 YUY2 YV12 UYVY I420
bash-3.00$

*************************************

thank you for the response.. : ) hope we could find a right solution to my problem..thanks to you all.. :)