Tim wrote
There's gnome-mplayer (there's probably a KDE variant), and smplayer, to try out, at least.
I have used GUI programs like XMMS or Audacious to play streams, but sometimes you need to tweak the preferences, to increase cache sizing, to avoid skips. Totem is too much of a black box (not enough options to play with).
Before seeing above response, I had just tried smplayer and it seems to be working well no skips
smplayer -playlist xxxxxxxxx.pls
and it comes up with a small window that has volume slider and mute just what i want..
I havent tried it yet to play audio dvd
Seems like I can remove Totem
Jack