Bug#557260: Can confirm this bug.

[Aleksey Kliger]

I can confirm this bug.

A workaround that worked for me, was to downgrade from the
debian-multimedia.org versions of libavcodec52 and libavformat52
to the testing versions:

debian-multimedia.org's versions:
* libavcodec52 5:0.5+svn20091118-0.0
* libavformat52 5:0.5+svn20091118-0.0
* result:  totem cannot playback xvid files.  There is no crash, but
the window remains black and there is no playback.

official debian.org versions:
* libavcodec52 4:0.5+svn20090706-2+b1
* libavformat52 4:0.5+svn20090706-2+b1
* result: totem works as expected.

-- 
Aleksey