ok, this is messed up, cairo should work. can i ask if you have frame skipping enabled, as the worst case scenario for skip on late is what your seeing, i.e. nothing is rendered. so if you have it enabled then maybe it's a bug when cairo is involved and you should try again without frame skipping enabled.

i've got easy debian talking to gstreamer on the maemo side for audio so will compile gnash for easy debian with cairo, so nows a good time to see if it works for video.. and to at least see if we get some rendering with cairo.

if it takes ages on your desktop, then compiling on easy debian will probably take the whole day. stay tuned...