Ive been trying to get my new Novatech lappy to play DVDs under Ubuntu Feisty for a couple of weeks without success. Today I have found the problems, fixed one of them and found a work around for the other.

Problem one is that all my media players which can play video seem to hate beryl with a passion. They start up and immediately close again with no error. If I switch back to metacity while playing DVDs this problem goes away. Its an annoying work around, but deals with the problem.

The second problem was that the de-encription thingy flat refused to work. Even though it was installed correctly, the encripted bits of DVDs failed to play. After much googling I finally found one person mentioning that a new DVD drive needs to have its region set before it will play. This I had forgotten since its been a while since I had a new drive. I downloaded regionset, set region 2 and all is now well with the world

so two reasons for the post, to hopefully reduce the amount of googling needed for the next person who forgets to set their region and to ask if anyone can suggest why xine and friends seem to hate beryl so much?

Try VLC instead of Xine, also make sure Xines video output is set to Xv, and you should have no probelms with Beryl.
All my GPUs are nvidia though.