What software can I use to be able to watch DVD's????i put in a DVD and reads it as a dvd but it doesn't let me see it.. how do i do this??????

With a DVD playing app - as a wild guess.

Ok, so something like xine or mplayer - though as to whether they'll play "out of the box", I don't know. I can't recall the command for searching packages under debian - but it's something like I've used the mplayer example as I seem to remember that theres a codecs packages for it as well that'll probably need installing.

Once installed you should (theoretically) be able to run the app and view the DVD

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Well i googled:

http://linuxgazette.net/issue81/durodola.html
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=...1247243&tid=39

A couple of articles there mentioning the same sort of thing

Infact it's about time i got mine playing DVDs, cheers for the nudge

With most distros there shouldn't be a problem with watching DVDs "out of the box". However, there is a problem with watching encrypted DVDs, and for this, the only current solution is libdvdcss (http://developers.videolan.org/libdvdcss/). Have a search through whichever package manager you use to see if it is available there.

Please note that I'm not 100% certain about the legality of this - the author was taken to court over this but AFAIK nothing ever came of it and DVD Jon is still doing his rounds. There should be no problem anyway, as long as you are using legit DVDs.

the apt-get install mplayer did not work:::
this is what i get when i do this...

carspidey@debian:~$ sudo apt-get install mplayer
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package mplayer is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package mplayer has no installation candidate


then i used this:
user@debian:~$sudo synaptic
and search for DVD but i don't know which one to install...
i want to be able to watch DVD's in Linux...

I recently installed VLC media player, it does a good job. I'm sure mplayer is nice too.

When you get the "E: Package mplayer has no installation candidate" message from Debian, it means that that package doesn't exist in the sources Debian knows about (see /etc/apt/sources.lst). That could be because the package is misspelled, or because the package is, for example, non-free (as in freedom).

What you can do is add a source (repository) to your sources.lst that has the relevant package. For example, see the instructions here:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-debian.html

Don't forget to run "# apt-get update" after changing sources.lst.

Strangely, the VLC repository doesn't have the library package libdvdcss2, so I hunted it down:
Warning: The libdvdcss2 file is used for de-encrypting DVD Zone regions, and may be illegal to use where you live.

What I did after installing VLC and realizing I couldn't get libdvdcss2 from my sources, I added "deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main" to sources.lst, then used apt-get update, then installed the library file. I then commented out that source (added a # at the beginning of the line) and did another apt-get update. (All of this as root of course.) This got me the file one time without me having to worry about it being in my sources.lst for future updates.

Do yourself a big favor, and read this:
http://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#apt-howto