After installing 6.3, recommended by support to fix the intermittent spinning circle of death problem, now videos don't play without locking up my entire x.org session
I get about half a second of playback and sound (sometimes) then everything freezes including mouse. A ctrl-alt-backspace fixes it but I have to wait about 5 seconds for it to happen. Big time regression - this never happened with 6.0 - 6.2. I found taking opengl=true out fixes it, but then the overlays flicker.
I have an nvidia card with twinview on ubuntu 7.10. No compiz or anything right now.
update. if I wait for 10 seconds playback will continue fine and xorg including the mouse will unfreeze. Then process monitor refreshes and shows the previous time as being spent with both cpu cores 100% but further cpu back in the normal 5% range. It's rather disturbing having my entire session freeze for 10 seconds whenever I start a playback though.
edit: even though I had all the updates installed for ubuntu 7.10, the nvidia driver was from april. I downloaded the september driver from nvidia.com and that appears to have fixed the problem.