I tested totem with gnome-session in CorePure64 and the "+" button lets me choose a local video file, but will not display it anywhere so I cannot play it.
This being said, any video file saved under ~/Videos will be displayed automatically by totem - this is because they are indexed by the tracker data miner. You can also select another location for tracker to index recursively (for example, /mnt/sdb1/media) and all video files found there will also be displayed automatically.
Unfortunately the above doesn't help you in 32-bit tinycore, so you are stuck with launching totem and the video you wish to play from the cli.
(Interestingly, with the dleyna* extensions loaded, I can watch apple movie trailers, euronews, etc and play videos streamed from my local media streamer - the totem youtube search does not work though.)