Hi again impeteperry
. This should help you get going:
1 - Since you said you've just installed Ubuntu, it's worthy to mention that nearly every distro out there, ships with broken media players. It is broken because you know, Linux is free, mp3 and other formats are not, etc etc etc
. I believe that's why you can't play DVD's (or any other media file actually, not even mp3 out of the box). The first thing you will have to do is to grab all codecs from mplayer site:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html
I got the package "all", because I want to play everything, from DivX to mpeg, etc.
Side Note: I'm not sure if this step is necessary to play DVD's, but since I use Totem for everything, I found handy to grab the "all" packages.
2 - Now we will create a directory to place all the codecs, uncompress and move the codecs to that folder:
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/win32
bunzip2 all-20050412.tar.bz2
tar xvf all-20050412.tar
sudo mv all-20050412/* /usr/lib/win32
3 - By default, Totem in Ubuntu uses gstreamer as the rendering engine. I found Xine to be a much better one, so we will install it now:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xine-ui
sudo apt-get install totem-xine
doing this, we will remove totem-gstreamer and install totem-xine. You should now be able to play your DVD's and any imaginable video format through either xine or totem. I'm just playing my Superman DVD now and it works.
Good luck!
EDIT: if you get an error message while trying to install xine-ui (sudo apt-get install xine-ui), that means you've to add the Universe repositories to you source.list. It's simple, simply remove the dashes (#) from the following lines at your
/etc/apt/source.list. I'm using gedit as the editor here, but anything will do of course:
sudo gedit /etc/apt/source.list
The lines you've to look at are these:
# deb http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe
# deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe
Save the file and close your editor. Remember that the above is the mirror near me, yours might look differently, but the lines should end with "universe" anyway. Remember also to type once again
apt-get update, or else apt-get won't see the changes you made in that file