Best DVD player?

[Sean Hammond]

Setting up ubuntu (breezy) for a friend, I'm wondering what the best
thing to install for DVD support is. My friend is a technophobe and is
going to have to manage the machine herself, doing the upgrades etc.,
so I need to make it easy for her and not de-stabilise the system at
all or doing anything that's going to require exrea work or knowledge
down the line.

* I find that the default totem-gstreamer on breezy doesn't offer very
reliable playback and can't handle DVD menus very well.

* totem-xine seems to work well on Breezy and probably has the easiest
UI for her, but I think the package might conflict with
totem-gstreamer, i.e. when she does updates it will want to put
totem-gstreamer back in place of totem-xine, and I think I might have
to remove ubuntu-desktop also. I don't want to mess around with the
system in any way that she might notice.

* xine-ui works well, but the UI is not very easy to use and will
probably be confusing. Also I find xine playback gets jerky sometimes
and xine has to be restarted.

* I've been told VLC is very good and has skins which offer a good UI.
I wonder how VLC compares to xine for good, reliable playback? I find
xine is good but does mess up sometimes. Also I'm told that I should
use the latest VLC package for breezy from here:

http://nightlies.videolan.org/

but I'm not sure about adding a 3rd party repository and package. Is
this going to mess  things up much? Is there a backport from Dapper I
can use instead? Is there really a big difference between the default
breezy version and this latest one, since she only wants to play DVDs?

I'm gonna try out the different approaches myself, but hardly have
time to do extended testing, so any comments would be helpful.

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