I have Ubuntu 6.10 running a
spare laptop. I am testing out this Linux distribution to see if I am comfortable
moving my daily activities to Linux. (Ultimately our XP machines through out our
home are going to be be replaced with Macs or Linux workstations.)

I have a XP session running in a VM on my VWMare server.
This particular XP session downloads and manages the various podcasts that I follow
on a regular basis. (I time shift a lot of content to my car via MP3 CD and to my
MP3 player at work in addition to playing the on my home network.)

I have been able to update Ubuntu 6.10 to play all of the audio podcasts but not the
video podcasts. I stumbled across this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=384897
which pointed me in the right direction.

The solution turned out to be installing the VLC
Media Player. (I had previously tried the gstreamer codecs and various codecs.)
The only complaint that I have about the VLC Media Player is that it will not let
me open the files from a SMB point
on my network. I ended up having to copy the files to local machine. (I will need
to look at using the mount command to make it look like local disk and see if that
solves with problem.)