[ale] multimedia woes in Ubuntu Hardy/Intrepid

[Daniel Howard]

Well, my dad's new Dell Inspiron 1525 with Hardy Ubuntu has been great
for him, except this weekend on a visit he tried to play an encrypted
DVD.  No go, and then I tried to play mp3s, also no go.  Get Totem error
of invalid stream for both cases.  Verified that libdvdcss and
libdvdread are installed, still no go.  Saw blogs about updates to
Ubuntu breaking mp3 and DVD playback and giving same error message about
invalid streams, and to try going into preferences, sound, and choosing
something other than autoselect (alsa, pulseaudio, etc.) none of them
work either now.  He ran a full update a while back, so I'm suspecting
that.  Worse, since his dell came with LinDVD, that doesn't even launch
now.  Anyone seen this problem and have ideas for fixing?  I can burn a
restoration DVD to put his laptop back into factory setup in worse-case.

Daniel