How to play a DVD in Linux

It's maddening how the simplest multimedia tasks become difficult in Linux.  Although to be fair, I had a lot of trouble playing DVD's in Windoze too.  In fact, really, I think I managed to get DVD's playing in Linux with a lot less effort than it took me with Windoze.

Anyway, the built-in Totem Movie Player in Ubuntu will do the trick.  You just need to load Xine (the default installation uses Gstreamer, God knows why).  Some commercial DVD's also use encryption (again, God knows why), so you also need to run a simple command to enable Xine and Totem to play them too.  Here are the instructions on that: Xine - no encrypted DVD playback & libdvdcss - Ubuntu Forums