DVD Playback in Debian

[Andrew Barr <barr.156@osu.edu>]

There is a lot of information on this subject: a lot of out-of-date
information. I would like to play some of my DVDs on my Debian laptop.
Yes, that includes (all?) those encrypted with CSS. I am not against
building packages from source code but I'd like to avoid doing so as to
keep things within the dpkg database.

Here's the thing that absolutely pisses me off: Late last night I was
able to get xine to play a DVD, an encrypted DVD. I couldn't get any
sound, so I decided to leave it alone for the time being and try again
in the morning. Now it won't play the discs at all: It says it can't
read the NAV packets and the console has errors from libdvdcss saying
there were errors getting the CSS key.

My bottom line question to anyone who has set up DVDs on their machine
is this: what packages do you have and how did you set it up? I have a
USB DVD+RW drive so DMA is not available (or necessary?).

Thanks,
Andrew Barr
barr.156@osu.edu