totem won't play dvds, here's how i solved it
 

i tried to play my dvd, but it didn't work on totem gstreamer. went to rpm.pbone.net (i give it a 9), freshrpms.net(7), and most notably, rpmfind.net (9), and got all the plugins for dvds which i lacked -- fc4 doesn't come with libdvdcss, libdvdread... etc. anything that had 'libdvd' in it, i installed, along with all the 'gstreamer' plugins. i used gst-register-0.8 and that helped; now totem actually recognized the dvd, but all it showed up was a black screen. i looked on alot of threads for help, and found that gstreamer was crud and to look to xine. i removed totem, because of problems with it, tried a clean reinstall, but it asked for libraries i had already installed -- glibc. to be short, because of dependency problems, i got kaffeine for fc3, even though i have fedora 4, after i installed the xine libraries. it works great.
who else has solved this problem? how did you do it? i fear kaffeine is no longer looked at, though it works fine now. any luck with totem?

The problem with package based distributions is the dependency or dependencies crap. The best way and the only way to experience Linux is to compile all programs that you want to use. Compiling takes a long time, so does going through all the dependencies to just get one program running. Gentoo makes this easier than Linux From Scratch.

I usually use Video Lan Client, but it got screwd up after version 0.7.2 as the developers added more code. I then switch to xine-ui (a frontend to xine-lib). I did not care for the DVD menu navigation, but I only care for audio and video sync. MPlayer may be an universal media player but it lacks audio and video sync.