Q I have recently installed Ubuntu on my Toshiba 1800 laptop. It seems to work fine but DVD playback is choppy in Xine and MPlayer crashes as soon as I try to play a movie. Any guidance you can give me would be appreciated!
A Top of the list of things to try is to make sure DMA is enabled for your DVD drive. Something like:
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc (changing hdc for the device of your DVD if it's different)
should do the job. MPlayer as supplied with Ubuntu has a number of problematic issues - if you really want to have it, it's best to compile it from source.