I have installed mythtv on my dedicated gentoo machine...I have ironed out most of the errors, except that some videos that I play do not let me fast forward, rewind, pause or even exit. When I want o exit the movie I have to actually close out of X (ctrl+alt+backspace) ... is there something that is not configured proper;y that I need to change? And once again this doesn't happen with all videos nor does it matter the type, sometimes its avi sometimes it mpeg.

bump

Try calling mplayer with the -idx option. It builds a seek table for video formats that do not contain one, thus allowing you to seek.