A couple questions about playing DVDs

[Stephen R Laniel]

I've only just started playing DVDs on my Ubuntu laptop, and
I have a couple questions:

1) For some reason totem-gstreamer just won't play my movies
properly. In particular, it can't seem to access the DVD
menu on Almodovar's _Bad Education_. But totem-xine works
just fine. Any idea why this is? I haven't the faintest clue
what the difference between the two totems is.

2) The default subtitle font is quite ugly. How does one
change that font? It really seems like this ought to be a
Totem preference, but it's not.

I should probably also mention

3) Only with DMA turned on via hdparm -- which the kind
folks on this list introduced me to weeks ago -- does DVD
playing proceed smoothly. However, if I turn DMA on at
bootup (via /etc/hdparm.conf), I get all kinds of flakiness
in the boot process -- SeekErrors, long delays, timeouts
during the LVM startup, etc. Has anyone else had these
problems with hdparm? And can you suggest any way out of
them? My solution up to now has been just to run hdparm
after bootup, when I'm about to play a DVD or somesuch, but
I'd prefer not to have to think about it. (My motto is: if
Windows users don't have to think about it, and their user
experience is fine, then I shouldn't have to think about it
either.)

Thanks for any advice.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key