Comment 7 for bug 181172

I don't know if this is related, but I'm commenting just in case. I tried mplayer to see if that would work, and at first it didn't. All but the ggi video output driver failed.

After searching around I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mplayer/+bug/159861, so I tried "killall gnome-screensaver" before launching mplayer, and voila, mplayer worked. However, this did nothing to help totem, which still crashes. Still, thought I'd just throw this out there.