I have some DVDs that I play sometimes and I play them in my DVD player and they look and play fine. But when I tried to play them in VLC they came out a little pixelated. It must be a VLC thing because I know that these DVDs are in great quality and VLC has been known to not work with some other DVDs I have lying around. Is there an extra codec that I must install in order for VLC to start playing the DVDs in better quality?

The operating system that I am using is the latest release of Ubuntu Studio.

could also be a codec issue. typically DVDs have non-free codecs that are required for playback.

do you have any other DVD's to test with? also try some of the other media players out there to play the DVDs.

Do you get the same quality with other players like Kaffeine or mplayer. Also, did you install the libdvdcss codec?

I used MPLAYER (with XINE) and it all looked great. Not as much pixelating as VLC did but when I tried to play another set of DVDs I have recently found it came out off sync (video and audio didn't really match up under XINE). I switched back to VLC for this set of DVDs and it all looked and worked fine. I guess it's just that one set of DVDs I have is authored differently than all the others.

In doing some experimentation with different media players I have found that some work with different DVDs and may work with some DVDs better than others. I found that whenever I play movies VLC seems to be the best media player to use. When I play DVDs that feature episodes from a television show (or compilation DVDs), They seem to work fine in XINE. I don't know why this is but maybe because some of them are authored differently. I guess I'll have to roll with this until a media player comes out dedicated to playing DVDs (since proprietary codecs aren't always available in media players. PowerDVD is an example of a DVD oriented media player)

Have you given any thought to updating your Debian to Wheezy? Debian releases (unlike people) don't always improve with age.
jdk

I am using Ubuntu studio and it's been updated to the latest software installs in the raring repository which is the latest release if Ubuntu