I've had xine working perfecty well on many occasions...I change my system constantly, so there is no real way to surely say what may have changed to cause this problem, but...

When trying to play a vcd with Xine, it starts (with no sound), plays for a few seconds, then halts requiring a pid kill to close xine. Tried different vcds, different formats, etc...
All other functions of xine work fine.
Tried different versions of Xine, same problem...
Tried different versions of vcdimager, same problem...
I do notice the hard drive chugging away, more and more fiercely before the crash of Xine -- buffer inadequacy problem?

I imagine this question will require someone experienced with xine, or this particular problem in another player...

PLEASE don't just answer "use Mplayer" as I do have mplayer, but it does not fit my needs for a vcd player (that plus I hate it). I keep it for it's mencoder functions only.

Any help greatly appriciated!

more info....
I am running oss, not alsa, for sound.
If I (1) disable arts, and (2) set my audio device to null in xine, the vcd video plays back sucessfully without freezing (no sound, of course). I must do both, one or the other doesn't work alone.
Again, this problem only affects the playing of vcd's, not dvd's or any other media...

Really odd...

Well, know I am going to regret this 'cause I had installed oss for a reason (which I can't recall at the moment - some software long ago that made me turn off arts before it would run, until I installed oss), but the problem with vcd audio was corrected when I removed oss and installed alsa. Still a strange bug in something, though...no way to know where it had its nest -- xine? oss? Some other decoding plugin on my system?

Well, I hope this helps someone somewhere at sometime who might be having the same problem...