Late news: It appears the xine-arts plugins may no longer be available or necessary. For more information about xine: http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:...hl=en&ie=UTF-8
I'm currently checking on Mplayer & aRts. It seems aRts support may need to be compiled into Mplayer, not sure if the currently available .deb packages from marillat have it.