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

Wed Jun 3 15:07:40 UTC 2009
Nicolas Thierry-Mieg <Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr>


David McGuffey 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.

you could install xine (it's in rpmforge), it works well for me for DVDs.
then the following should work:
xine dvd://