Nothing plays DVDs in Ubuntu Gutsy?

[chombee]

Has there been some sort of change in Ubuntu between Feisty and Gutsy
regarding playing commercial DVDs? The new automatic codec installation
certainly doesn't seem to be working (nothing ever asked me if I wanted
to install a codec), nor are all the normal methods.

The result is quite confusing as well. There are at least two different
sets of instructions on the Ubuntu website for how to get DVD playback,
and a third if you count the GNOME site that totem-gstreamer points you
to when you try to play a DVD. (It contains instructions with package
names that apparently don't apply to Ubuntu).

I've followed all the instructions on these pages:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs

https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/musicvideophotos/C/video.html#video-dvd

They don't seem to have been updated for Gutsy yet. But the second one
has the same instructions as I get if I go to System->Help in Gutsy. So
I have installed ubuntu-restricted-extras, libdvdcss2 (tried the
medibuntu repository version, and the install-css.sh version, as per the
two different sets of instructions for installing it), libdvdnav4,
libdvdread3, libxine1-ffmpeg and a whole bunch of other stuff besides.
And I have tried totem-gstreamer, totem-xine, vlc, mplayer, gxine,
xine-ui and ogle, nothing will play a DVD. It worked fine on feisty.

The one thing is that the second set of instructions linked above says
to install libdvdplay0, the instructions refer to feisty and I can't
find that package for gutsy. I even searched for it on
http://packages.ubuntu.com/, it's not there.

I'll try to provide some useful info about what errors the various
players give me. They all seem to be telling me that I don't have
libdvdcss2, though I certainly do. As I said, I've tried both versions
of it, installed, reinstalled, rebooted, etc.

Oh, and I've tried all this with several DVDs too.

Totem (gstreamer), when I insert a DVD:

"Could not open location; you might not have permission to open the
file."

and when I open it myself with the DVD already in, and choose Play Disc:

"Totem cannot play this type of media (DVD) because it does not have the
appropriate plugins to be able to read from the disc.

"Please install the necessary plugins and restart Totem to be able to
play this media."

There is a button labelled "More information about media plugins" that
opens <http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/#codecs> in a web browser.

Totem-gstreamer gives no output to the console.

Totem-xine says:

"The source seems encrypted, and can't be read. Are you trying to play
an encrypted DVD without libdvdcss?"

and it prints a load of stuff out to the console:
<http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/41867/>

Mplayer gives this output: <http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/41868/> then it
freezes for a long time before giving a *lot* of output that looks like
this <http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/41869/> These "CRC check failed!"
messages along with "a52: error at resampling messages" seem to go on
forever.

Next up, the legendary vlc, which fails pretty ungracefully with a core
dump: <http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/41870/>

Gxine gives the error "Encrypted or faulty DVD" and prints out this to
the terminal <http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/41871/>

Plain xine says "The source can't be read. Maybe you don't have enough
rights for this, or source doesn't contain data (e.g. not disc in
drive). (Encrypted or faulty DVD)" and prints
<http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/41872/>

Finally, ogle. The first ever program I used to play DVDs on Ubuntu back
in the warty days. So simple. It just crashes, and prints to the
console:

WARNING[dvd_gui]: add_keybinding(): No such action: 'SaveScreenshot'
WARNING[dvd_gui]: add_keybinding(): No such action:
'SaveScreenshotWithSPU'
WARNING[ogle_mpeg_ps]: dvdreadblocks only got 1, wanted 243
FATAL[ogle_mpeg_ps]: dvdreadblocks failed

So, that's a whole lot of error messages, but it doesn't tell me
anything about what the problem is. Well, it sounds like libdvdcss2 is
missing, but it isn't. Does it suggest anything to anyone out there? Am
I alone in this or is there a common problem with playing DVDs on Gutsy?
And what is the 'official' method for enabling DVD playback on Gutsy?

Thanks thanks thanks