Finally got this worked out. First I set the DVD region on my drive with regionset, which got rid of the seek errors that hdc was complaining of.
At this point I could get the DVDs to actually start playing, but then xine or mplayer would quit, complaining of css issues. This seemed odd, since I had installed libdvdcss2 previously. However, installing it again, after adding the videolan sources to apt-get, all works fine! Thanks for the help Branden -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]