Whoa, this took a freakin' long time to fix! Here was my problem: VLC wouldn't play encrypted DVDs, which was really aggravating. After installing a whole slew of codecs, I think it's only right to finally share what ended up working. First, I should mention it -still- doesn't work in VLC. In fact, the only way I got it to work was to use a different player altogether, gxine. So here is the work around, which I got from this link.
1.) Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list
##Medibuntu-Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon
##Please report any bug on https://launchpad.net/products/medibuntu/+bugs
deb http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ gutsy free non-free
deb-src http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ gutsy free non-free
2.) from the command line, run: sudo apt-get upgrade
3.) sudo apt-get install libdvdread3 libdvdcss2 gstreamer xine-ui libxine1-ffmpeg gxine regionset
4.) Make sure your region is set using regionset (set region to 1) -- I suspect most people won't need to do this
5.) from the command line, run: sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh, or simply: sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
6.) Go to System --> Preferences --> Removable Drives and Media
7.) Click on the "multimedia" tab. Under "Video DVD discs" Click "play video DVD discs when inserted" and enter the following for the command:
gxine -S dvd:/
Pop in a DVD and it should work!
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UPDATE: ok... so it -does- also work with VLC now. Win?
UPDATE 2: It works with xine as well :-) Sick. Ok, I declare update this from "bandaid"ed, to fixed!
