What actually happened was that I had been using the 32 bit version of Slackware 14.1, but I had some memory issues with it, so I completely wiped my hard drive, and then installed the 64 bit version that I an using now, so there were no "leftover" files in it. And I just now checked out via pkgtool what was installed on my computer, and discovered, much to my chagrin, that libdvdcss wasn't installed on my system after all (sorry about that, my mistake). Oh well, live and learn.

And while I'm at it, I did instal libdvdcss to my system, and, no, I still can't use xine to watch DVDs .

How/from where did you install libdvdcss?
I am pretty sure I still use the version from Alien's restricted slackbuilds repo, the one for 14.0-64 works fine for 14.1-64 as far as I can tell.

Could you use the terminal again and tell us the output of
xine -f dvd://
and
ls /usr/lib64/libdvdc*
please?

I am sure I never recompiled xine or any other slackware-provided package, I am on 14.1-64 too, and the dvd plays, the output of xine -f dvd:// starts with

This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.7.
(c) 2000-2010 The xine Team.
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.13 for DVD access

I found that file here:

https://pkgs.org/

And the output for xine -f dvd:// is:

bash-4.2$ xine -f dvd://
This is xine (X11 gui) - a free video player v0.99.7.
(c) 2000-2010 The xine Team.
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.13 for DVD access
libdvdread: Attempting to use device /dev/sda1 mounted on / for CSS authentication
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/sda1 with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/sda1 for reading
libdvdread: Device /dev/sda1 inaccessible, CSS authentication not available.
libdvdnavVDOpenFilePath:findDVDFile /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO failed
libdvdnavVDOpenFilePath:findDVDFile /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.BUP failed
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.13 for DVD access
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/dvd for reading

The output for ls /usr/lib64/libdvdc* is:

bash-4.2$ ls /usr/lib64/libdvdc*
/usr/lib64/libdvdcss.la /usr/lib64/libdvdcss.so.2
/usr/lib64/libdvdcss.so /usr/lib64/libdvdcss.so.2.1.0

At least it's recognizing libdvdcss and that seems to be working ok (which the bolded asterisked line wasn't in your previous output).

Now it's a matter of diagnosing the permission issue. What groups are you assigned to? I'm guessing you didn't assign yourself to the recommended groups when you created your user.

If you are only assigned to the users group, you would need to run something like the following (replacing $USER with your username on the computer).

Thank you very much! I finally got xine to correctly play a DVD using "xine -f dvd://", however, what I have been wanting it to do is to play a DVD when I insert it into the DVD ROM drive as can be seen in the attachment, but what happens is that when I insert the DVD into the DVD ROM, a menu pops up which gives me a few options for handling the DVD - none of which includes the use of xine . So how do I override that?

Which attachment? Never mind actually, what are those few options for handling the dvd that do not include playing the dvd with xine?
Knowing what the options are will help find the config, and to find the config is to find the override.

You are in KDE, right? so does the menu look something like this?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cfeRiRRanu.../Kaffeine3.png

If so, the Configure button is clearly one to try.

No, but the menu options are:

Download Photos with Gwenview
Rip video DVD with k3b
Copy with k3b
Open with Video player (Dragon Player)
Open with File Manager

And when I try to run Dragon, I get the following output:

bash-4.2$ dragon
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.

And yes, I am in KDE mode.

OK, that sounds like the device notifier. Can you look for Device Actions in Settings -> System Settings?

I cannot check it right now but it is mentioned here:
https://techbase.kde.org/Development...Device_Actions

If you want to configure it system-wide, the solution is a bit more involved, but for the moment, just configuring it for your user account may be enough. Let us know how it went.

Those dragon warnings I think are mostly harmless, by the way.

Okay, now how do I get it to go directly into xine and play the DVD (WITHOUT that pop-=up menu)?

And by the way, I made the changes you suggested, but the pop-up menu options remained EXACTLY the same.

I don't think I suggested specific changes, I couldn't access KDE at that time, just a pointer about where to find the settings, based on what I saw on the web. Now I started KDE, I can see the Device Actions settings can also be accessed by right-clicking the device notifier icon in the systray and clicking Device Notifier Settings, then Device Actions.
And now I see that a lot of the default action entries cannot be deleted, and even changing their name to something else does not change the device notifier options subsequently presented by KDE. In my opinion, that is kind of annoying actually, that I am given the illusion I can customise there while I actually can't.

I had a look and found out that the actions are actually defined by what you have in /usr/share/apps/solid/actions (only editable with root access, I take).
To experiment, I moved all the files in there out of the way except /usr/share/apps/solid/actions/dragonplayer-opendvd.desktop and edited that file to have the command at the bottom say
to replace the dragon player command that was there before. Now, if I pop in a dvd, the device notifier pops up with the dvd title, and since there is now just one action available, I can just click on the dvd title and off it goes.

I can explain the above in more detail, but if you insist (this wasn't clear to me before) once you pop in the dvd you don't want to touch the mouse or keyboard at all anymore to have the dvd play, it might be pointless to do so, because I think KDE4 possibly just does not support that without hacks.

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but my first "venture", if you will, in Linux, was with an operating system known as Vector Linux 7.0, which had a nice feature in that if you wanted to play a DVD, all you had to do was to open the main menu, and click Settings/Removable Drives and Media, click the "Multimedia" tab, and under "Video CDs/DVDs type in "xine -f dvd://", close that window, insert a DVD to the drive, then just sit back and enjoy the show - and not a pop-up window in sight (could it be that in this case, the Device Notifier is somehow conflicting with that process?).

That sounds like Gnome, which does not come with Slackware by default.
This link might be of interest in that context:
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=86921

The KDE device notifier is not getting in the way of much I think, it just does not have the feature that you want.
I am sure that it must be possible to configure something outside of the KDE settings, though.
For example, here they talk about autodetecting the insertion of dvds with udev for automounting purposes (doesn't look too Ubuntu-specific at first glance):
http://askubuntu.com/questions/35985...on-of-dvd-disc
Instead of running automount commands when a dvd is detected, nothing to prevent putting in a xine command instead. But the solution would have to be able to distinguish between a video dvd and a regular data dvd, unless you don't mind having xine always pop up anyway.

So the question becomes how much effort you want to put in to find out how to automate this.

The fact is that I don't really "need" to have DVDs play automatically (although it would have been nice), I'm jut thankful that I can even view them. So thank you all for the help that you gave me, and i will consider the issue as "solved".