Got mplayer to work with all speakers, via the -channels 6 option. Also got xine working with menus, 5.1 and all. I had to use older versions of libdvdcss (0.0.3 i think it was) and lib dvdread(0.90 i believe). I guess using the latest versions of everything isnt always the way to go. It plays so much nicer than it does in win xp with powerdvd. I can multitask without the dvd skipping, and dont get the audio popping like I do in XP. Now I just need to figure out if theres any way to have dts playback under linux... Another side effect of using the older versions of those libraries is that dvd::rip works flawlessly now too. (it didnt used to work on encrypted dvds)