Thanks to all who tried to help me to get rid of Totem,

I got Totem working with Easy Ubuntu.
http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/index.html
I no longer need to get rid of it.

It may not be everybody's cup of tea and is probably not the proper
fix, but it worked well enough for me to get my media straightened
out. I never did get MPlayer set up as my default for streaming
media, but at least Totem will now play embedded streaming media.