any way to get good DVD playback?

[AbeFreeman]

Hi all you Linux gurus out there. I'm trying to get my family interested in changing over to Linux, but there's one rather embarrassing problem: DVDs that play just fine on Windows (even on ancient laptop) won't play well on Linux (Mint 9). In movieplayer the picture is fine, but the sound quality is lousy, like a warbly old cassette tape. VLC has no problem with the sound, but the movie skips sections (it will just stop for a second or 2, and then carry on with sound and picture at a point (1 or 2 seconds) later on in the movie. Dual core AMD processor with 2MB RAM. Our old 1MHZ laptop with 256K RAM honestly does much better with windows (using either powerDVD or Windows Media Player). Any way to fix this?
Thanks so much

[bitmason]

you actually have DVD playback with windows media player? that's odd...

[hemimaniac]

First make sure that libdvdcss-dev and libdvdread4 and libdvdnav are installed then if all else fails stuff ubuntu-restriced-extras in

solves my issues everytime

[AbeFreeman]

Made sure all those libs were installed, but still have the same problem. I have another Dell machine (vostro 220) now running Mint13 and it has the exact same problem: DVD's will play just fine using Windows XP (whether using WMP 11 or PowerDVD) but on linux they will skip chunks (video and sound freeze for a second or 2, and then jump ahead, meaning that you miss chunks of the DVD -- very annoying!). This is with clean (no scratches), store bought DVDs. Seriously, I can't be the only one running Mint that has these problems with DVD playback, but I can't seem to find a solution on the forums (it doesn't help that the forum search ignores "DVD" and "VLC" because they're too short).