DVD Playback on Ubuntu 8 Linux

I was having a really hard time getting DVD to play on Hardy Heron, but finally got it. After a daily ritual of attempts, finally, Ted and I struck gold!

Our symptoms:
- Only the FBI warning would play.
- Some players would play the rest, but with about 1 frame per second playback.
- Many video players would lock up when we tried to play the DVD.

Players we tried:
- Totem (with xine and gstreamer backends)
- VLC player
- Kaffeine
- MPlayer

Things we tried:
- Downloading many a restricted codec package
- Enabling DMA on the DVD drive
- Can't remember; doesn't matter

Final solution:
- Win32 codecs needed
- Reboot required

Important note:
- To find the win32 codecs, make sure you look for w32codecs.

i.e...

sudo apt-get install w32codecs

Now, I can watch Get Smart!

Update for Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu 9.04

For some reason, this required an extra step in Jaunty. In fact, there's a whole section devoted to exposing the new repo for media-related libraries, called Medibuntu.

Basically, there are more steps to get to the w32codecs and the other libraries that you supposedly need:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update