One of the things that makes Ubuntu such a popular Linux distribution is that it comes with a ton of useful applications preinstalled. When you first boot Windows, you may have Windows Media Player, and Internet Explorer but you need a separate application suite if you want to create and edit spreadsheets, databases, or Word documents. Ubuntu, on the other hand includes a media player, web browser, office suite, and a few other goodies.

But one thing that you can't do with a stock Ubuntu installation is play commercial DVDs. While the Totem movie player will certainly make a valiant effort at playing the video on any DVD you stick in your computer, it won't manage to bring up DVD menus and may have problems playing the video. It turns out it's very easy to enable DVD playback. Just open a terminal and type the following two lines (entering your root password when prompted):

sudo apt-get install totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

Or if you'd rather not play around with the terminal, you can open the Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for VLC. The VideoLan media player is capable of playing DVDs without any tweaking.

[via Tech-Recipes]