Playing DVDs

[drhowarddrfine]

It's been a while since I tried playing DVDs with FreeBSD but another Windows upgrader gave me (for free, of course) their box with a DVD player so I want to try and get software to play it. I briefly attempted this with mplayer on another box a few days ago and had only limited success. I think I would like to just use mplayer but have no solid reason except I never could get vlc to work right (again just trying it for a short time).

So before I start down this path, I'm just wondering if there are any gotchas I need to be aware of and any handy tutorials there might be, other than the handbook or mplayer's docs. Or will someone really want to talk me out of using mplayer?

I'm asking since I've never gotten anything to work 100% with DVDs though mplayer has worked with downloaded multimedia just fine. I'll be playing owned DVDs and Netflix stuff mostly.