[CentOS] Can't play DVD movies on CentOS 5.3 after following guidance on the wiki

[Ron Blizzard]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 8:52 AM, David McGuffey
<davidmcguffey at verizon.net> wrote:
> This is my first post here on the CentOS forums.  I've been running Fedora
> since FC4, and have been working with RHEL 4 at work.  But this is my first
> foray into CentOS.
>
> I followed the multimedia guidance on the wiki, and now have the ability to
> view a lot of different video clips on the Internet, and have the ability to
> listen to a variety of music files.  However, watching a DVD movie still
> escapes me. I followed all the steps on the page in the wiki, and had no
> errors in the output.

DVD playing has been kind of an odd problem for me on my desktop
computer using CentOS 5.3. No problem at all on my laptop. I like and
use VLC, but it won't play DVDs on this particular computer -- I get a
segmentation error. Nor will mPlayer or Totem work. Xine works fine,
so I just use that. VLC works fine on my laptop. I've never had any
luck with Totem.

> When I put the DVD (Master and Commander in this case), into the drive,
> totem automatically comes up and I get a warning that I don't have the
> correct codec to play it.

That's my experience. And there never seems to be any fix that actually works.

> I killed totem and manually tried to start the DVD with mplayer. mplayer sat
> there...not recognizing that there was a DVD in the drive.

mPlayer, on my computer, recognizes the DVD, it just doesn't play it.

> So...what final steps do I need to complete to get a commercial DVD movie to
> play?
>
> machine is a Dell Latitude D830 with 2GB of ram and an Intel Core 2 Duo.

The first thing I would try is downloading and installing VLC. If that
doesn't work, go for Xine.

-- 
RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3