TandJ, the version of SDL in Ubuntu 9.10 is incompatible with some X server drivers or X itself and a particular feature of SDL that MLT uses. I confirmed this is fixed in the latest version of SDL I built from source tarball, but I do not know when it will appear in Debian or Ubuntu. Looks like we need to start a campaign to request that upgrade if it has not already started. I will look around or file a ticket somewhere.

I think I'm having the same problem.
ffplay, melt, kdenlive and openshot all show a few frames (variable 3 > 20 frames ) seconds of what appears to be squashed video in the top 5% of the window with vertical lines and blocks of unrelated colour in the rest of the screen. Then it (all of them) exits with segmentation fault. I've tried with different audio configurations but to no avail. I've tried compiling SDL 1.2.14 but am complete novice at such things and got no result (I followed instructions at http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi/FAQ_Compiling_on_Linux but get nothing for sdl-config).
Looking forward to 1.2.14 being in karmic.

I submitted a bug report to Debian:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=557711

As a followup to the problem with the squeezed and green video, I confirmed that this is a bug in the 1.2.13 version of SDL provided in Ubuntu 9.10 and some X server drivers. I also confirmed that the newer 1.2.14 version of SDL fixes this problem on the X server where I was able to reproduce this problem and there is no workaround or fix I can make in MLT to make it work with 1.2.13.

Could you guys open a bug on Ubuntu and various distros trancking systems.