The default video player on my Gnome desktop (Mageia 6) is totem. It did not play the DVD yesterday that I wanted to watch. Fortunately, VLC did start the playback when I checked the option “No disc menus” under “Media | Open Disc”. Though I had to manually select the correct video under “Playback | title” (it was the last element on the list). It worked for the first 30-40 minutes but then the playback stopped and the error message indicated that the next blocks/sectors of the DVD could not be read. Surprisingly, the issue was reproducible yesterday but not today.
The workaround was to use mplayer which has only a commandline interface:
mplayer dvd://1212 is the number of the corresponding title which I chose in VLC. It worked flawlessly. Important hotkeys to control the playback (consider the man page for mplayer for all hotkeys):
f: Fullscreen toggle
space: Start/Stop playback
o: Onscreen information toggle
arrows: Jump forward/backward (small steps)
page up/down: Jump 10 minutes forward/backward
v: Enable/Disable subtitles
Esc: Quit mplayer