I googled for an alternative solution but couldn't find anything useful. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
AFAIK Mplayer is probably the best (and only?) multimedia player on console. You don't need to compile from source. You can search and download .deb. apt-get.org is one source. debian-multimedia.org is another.
Or get it straight from the horses mouth :
Add
# mplayer deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ stable main
to your sources.list, run apt-get update and ENJOY ;-)
Regards,
- vihan