After downloading some recent updates for the GStreamer packages in Ubuntu I tried playing some H.264 video files again, and it seems to me that after the recent updates the problem no longer exists. Seeking is without lag now, I have not experienced any crashes anymore, and the distortion in the image after using seeking is gone as well. So I'm closing this.
Looks like the GStreamer team and Ubuntu did a great job in such a short time. When I first reported this bug I expected multimedia to still be hosed in Dapper , but now I'm confident it will be great. ** Changed in: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg (Ubuntu) Status: Needs Info => Fix Released -- GStreamer/Totem crashes when seeking in H264 video's https://launchpad.net/bugs/35052 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs