[Hampshire] Multimedia on Linux

Frequently on this list various young* men say that the only thing now that
they cannot do on Linux is serious gaming. So, please - how? I have spent
enough hours to have been becoming utterly ridiculous (and very annoying to
the young man concerned) trying to get Radio 3 working usably, never mind
getting CDs, DVDs, camera etc. working.

The initial problems: an old monitor and a box with only a SATA drive present
(no IDE at all). Both these were installed OOTB this time. (Tho' the
resolution could be better.) I had taken Etch, CentOS 5 and two versions of
Feisty to try. I tried Etch first - and we appeared to have lift-off.
Everything was great until I came to multimedia and now I have ground to a
complete halt. I have installed numerous varieties of Realplayer, Acrobat
Reader, flashplayer and Java and have tried Firefox (Iceweasel), Konqueror
and Opera. Still the BBC website will not play music acceptably. I have
googled, read what I could find - Radio 3 still plays so jerkily it is
impossible to listen to. On my long-in-the-tooth Libranet 3 it plays OOTB
(itis doing so now).

So please, kind people:

Can anyone give me advice on how to get radio 3, CDs, DVDs etc. playing in
Etch?

Alternatively, can anyone vouch that $DISTRIBUTION can, OOTB, handle:
an old monitor (Visionmaster Pro 501 I think it is), a box containing no IDE
drives, a Vivitar camera (a need for a card reader would be acceptable) and
all the usual - which seem fine on almost anything. I am even desperate
enough to try XP, but I don't know whether it could handle the lack of IDE
drive either.

I tried Etch first of this month's crop of new releases purely because it is
the one I am most familiar with administering in general. I am not wedded to
it.

TIA
Lisi
*i.e. under about 55