Mount DVD drive in Ubuntu

mount /dev/cdrom [dir]

In my case, I mount it in the existing media directory.

Playing videos in Ubuntu

Recently I've been having a problem playing videos in Ubuntu: all I see is a green screen. This happens for Totem Movie Player, mplayer and VLC. So far I fixed the problem in VLC. What I need to do is  to go to Tools > Preferences > Video and choose X11 video output (XCB) under Display Output. Un-checking the "Accelerated video output (Overlay)" works too. Using Xvideo as the output will cause the green screen.

Another useful tool for converting ogv file to high definition mp4 file is Arista Transcoder. You can install it from Ubuntu Software Center.

Also I installed all the libraries for media support mentioned in this post: 3 things to do after installing or upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04. Now I can also play mp4 file in the Chrome browser.

Video and audio conversion

For video conversion, avidemux is a good tool. Today I used it to rotate a mp4 video by 180 degrees. The instructions can be found here.

For audio conversion, soundconverter is good. I used it to convert a wma file to mp3. The instructions can be found here.