Playing DVDs using totem?

[Marcel Janssen]

On Saturday 07 May 2005 11:12, Toralf Lund wrote:
> This has probably been discussed before, but is anyone actually using
> totem to play DVDs these days? I've tried variants from various distros
> and installed every gstreamer plugin I can think of, but it still won't
> work. Originally, it wouldn't recognise DVDs at all, of course, now it
> will either crash or give messages like

Do you mean you installed binary packages from other distros ? If so -> bad 
idea to begin with. Crashes will be very likely.
I've tried totem, but I don't understand the UI. Play disc will not play the 
disc, so to my opinion it fails it's function ;-)
Also, many options that xine-ui has I miss in totem. xine-ui may not be the 
nicest UI, but it can do the job which is most important I think.

> And, no, I don't think I want to use xine or mplayer or whatever
> instead. I think they all have pretty lousy UIs, and mplayer in
> particular has also proven to be rather unreliable. 

About the UI you can do something. There are many frontends to xine like 
kaffeine or gxine.
Suggest using kaffeine. Worked straight away to play DVD for me and has all 
the necessary functions for me to support multimedia.

> I know one 
> application that generally just works most of the time, though: It's
> Ogle (http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~dvd/) Some of its features are
> incomplete, however, and it seems like there hasn't been a lot of
> development lately, and I've come across one DVD it won't play, so I
> thought I might try something else...

Another application is vlc (http://www.videolan.org/vlc)
If you install any of these, please use yum or apt so that at least you're 
sure that your not working with broken packages. It really saves you a lot of 
hassle in the end.

regards,
Marcel