So, I finally got dvd playing to work under linux with my hardware decoder. Turns out all I had to do was: recompile my kernel; download and compile xine-lib and xine-ui, dxr3, a deCSS plugin for xine, and libdvdread; and reload the dxr3 modules about a dozen times to get the module parameters correctly.

And people say linux is hard to use.

The preceding complaint brought to you by about a day's worth of futzing. I know this is what you get when you use bleeding edge stuff like DVD on linux, but it still sucks.