After following the ubuntuguide's steps to installing mplayer and its mozilla plugin, I tried to view movie trailers off of apple's website. However, I ran into some problems. I would see the mplayer-plugin pic in the box where the video was loading, however it would get to 25% and freeze. Also, when I would start the mplayer from the gnome menu, the app would freeze as the comp displayed the "busy" indicator. This is my only problem with ubuntu and the only thing keeping me from making my laptop linux-only. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

dumb question, but do you have the codecs? i wouldn't ask, but i'm not sure if they come with ubuntu or not.

yes, I installed both the win32 codecs and looked to find that the quicktime lib were installed

For me, some quicktime vids play, some don't. I heard it was a compression thing on the .mov that mattered, but I'm not sure. About half I've ran into play.

so what I'm encountering is normal ?

You need quicktime4linux to get the codecs. Just google for it and install it. I think it is on sourceforge but I'm not positive about that.

I found the quicktime4linux, but I could only locate rpm files, where can I get the deb version?

just use alien to convert it to a .deb