Removing deb-multimedia pkgs w/o removing everything

[Ed Jabbour <ejbr@att.net>]

I'd like to remove packages gotten from deb-multimedia and replace 
some from the Debian repos.  However, removing them will also remove a 
bunch  of libs and kde progs. E.g., apt-get remove libavcodec53 
yields:

0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 190 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

I'm not up to reinstalling 190 packages.  apt-get install that pkg 
just tells me that "libavcodec53 is already the newest version".  Is 
there any way around this?  Is it possible to easily replace the deb-
multimedia pkgs with the Debian ones?