if you have the time to experiment, could you try without ffmpeg-support ? (just delete the *film*.o and *movie*.o in Pixes,
run > "./configure --without-ffmpeg" and "make")
i'll try this ...
and before you do that: does it produce any output before crashing ?
no ...
ok, i have found a DVD of trainspotting and it worked just fine (ok, it eat up all of my CPU (800MHz)) ffmpeg fails to open the VOB-file, but libmpeg3 succeeds, and produces a lot of crab due to keyframe-problems. after creating a toc with mpeg3toc it played back fine (again with libmpeg3)
thanks for the hint ...
which version of ffmpeg are you using ?
media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20050226-r5
cheers ... tim