I took it for granted that DVD’s should play on Ubuntu … and sadly discovered earlier today that they, by default, often don’t. If you have a favorite player and it’s not working don’t bother trying other players – they probably won’t work either.
I didn’t research to deep into the cause of the problem (it seems to have something to do with zones and to have legal repercussions which prevent Ubuntu from making it work out-of-the-box) – but I was happy to find an easy solution (here) to make it work. It takes to command line commands to do correct it:
sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
… and you are good to go 🙂 enjoy!