Currently it seems that DVD playback with the gstreamer backed to totem is dead. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71519 implies rebuilding totem without gstreamer support should do the job, but that seems tedious.
I've had no major trouble with xine (0.99.1) and totem (0.99.16 using xine-lib 1.0.0) i seem to recall having to setup sound but I think that was just to make it play to the card i wanted (2 soundcards).
Yeah, totem with xine-lib support works ok - just not if I want to use gstreamer. Which, I guess I don't overly care about really, however I had understood gstreamer to be some sort of ultimate solution to the problem of multimedia decoding under linux, and it seems like it's fairly crippled if it can't in fact play back DVDs. I'd like to be shown how to make it work.
vlc (0.8.0) also seems to be working fine
Never occured to me to try vlc, despite using it elsewhere and knowing it supports DVDs. Ogle (I think) is another player that I've seen mentioned (usually in the same thread as people complaining about totem and saying mplayer is better) I'm using mplayer 1.0 pre6, totem 0.99.22 and xine-lib 1.0