MP3 playback crashes Totem (libxine)

[maschino@jouy.inra.fr]

Hello,

MP3 playback randomly crashes Totem (libxine backend). Except for unaligned
accesses, there's no usefull information on the console. Is there anybody out
there experiencing the same troubles? I've checked that MPEG/DivX movies or DVD
playbacks run flawlessly.

Replacing the totem-xine package by totem-gstreamer partly solves the problem.
Totem no more crashes, but stop playing for roughly 1 sec around 6-7 sec of
playback and then resume. Playback then continues normally up to the end. It
also seems that the goom animation during playback isn't as fluent as with the
libxine backend. CONFIG_PREEMPT is enabled in the kernel configuration file.

More generally, I'm a little confused with the ALSA sound subsystem. Debian
kernel 2.6 images include ALSA OSS emulation. There's also an alsa-oss package.
The documentation of this package states it's a wrapper for OSS applications and
say it's recommended to use it rather than the ALSA OSS emulation. However,
recompiling a kernel (vanilla or Debianized one) without ALSA OSS emulation
ends up with no usable /dev/dsp device for OSS applications (like totem-xine),
even with the alsa-oss package installed. Is this normal? Should I also install
gstreamer0.8-alsa? Or gstreamer0.8-oss? Or both?

Thanks for any explanation/advice.

    Emeric