Very simply, what is a good program for playing DVDs in Mandrake 10.1?

you have plenty, but these are my three favorites:

mplayer - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
Liked by a lot of people, my favorite choice. Comes with and without GUI. (set --enable-gui while configuring if you want this). Also supports most codecs.

vlc - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
This is can be very hard to install from source, but google it, and you'll find a good howto. This player has very many codecs, and is my second choise after mplayer.

xine - http://xine.sourceforge.net/
Very easy to install, this player even has support for dvd-menues.

Hope you like one of these, and good luck

- omes

You'll need libdvdcss too, regardless of which player you choose to use. Google will help.

Video Lan Client is not hard to compile. It just takes a long time because there are a lot of libraries if you want certain features that it supports. I estimate a weekend to compile and understand its features. The VLC developers is nice to list the packages that you can compile and install in order for certain features in VLC to work. The feeling of VLC is like Windows programs.

If you can get mplayer to compile, you should not have any trouble compiling other programs. mplayer has a high tolerance for video and audio files, so that is why it is popular. Though its problem is its audio and video sync is very, very poor.

Xine is ok, but you need to select a GUI other than its lib. It is very picky what video and audio files it can handle. The audio and video with xine is the best of the three.

To compile programs make sure you have devel, header, and kernel source code installed. It should be on the CD or you can get the these types of packages from an urpmi server.

Better still, instead of spending a weekend compiling, setup urpmi (mandrakes package manager) sources and download prebuilt binaries. More information on how to setup and use urpmi is available at Zebulon.org.uk.