Top five dvd players: 1. VLC player 2. 'nuff said.

The article makes you think that Microsoft omitted the ability to play DVD only in W8. No windows OS or Windows Media Player was able to play DVD out of the box. Before VLC and the other players mentioned here you were forced to install a dedicated DVD player like PowerDVD or WINDVD. Or the proper codec now avalaible in packs like K-Lite or Shark007

asdf, I agree.

Playing DVD's is a core necessity. Disgraceful oversight? No, the disgrace is endemic during the decline of a giant. Corporations are immortal provided they remain lean and nimble.

I may have to give PotPlayer a try. I was never able to get PowerDVD to actually play a Blu-Ray on my system.

How about a comparative review & reference for the Linux community?

@StWils, Most people around here don't use linux. So not that useful to most people. Besides for linux you'd just search the software repository and you will find plenty of players (besides vlc).

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) works fine for me on DVD and pretty well every other video and audio type. It is very well-behaved and unobtrusive.

For several yeass I haven't used anything but VLC on ALL platforms. Even the beta version on Android performs better then anything else available. XBMC is too hyped by the Linux community. It most certainly handles DVDs very well. In fact one could also rim them to make computer files.
First of all it does not need any additional codecs to be installed. I can play absolutely any container format. I can play it even as slow as 50 % speed WITHOUT distorting the audio or losing subtitles. Of course this needs more powerful processor. Try it with any other software and you will know.
I don't have any blue ray disks as these are prohibitively expensive here in India. In any case I haven't used a floppy drive in more than 10 years and very sparingly used DVD drive in last 3 years. I used to do everything from a USB flash drive but now that I have 2 Zalman external hard disk enclosures (VE-300 and VE-400) even that is not required.

You know what works really well is the Western Digital live player and ISO files. I dubbed off all my DVDs into ISO files onto a network attached storage and I just play them from there using a Logitech harmony remote.
Another thing that works really well is the Sony DVP-CX995V which holds Four Hundred discs in it !! I got one on Kijiji for $60 in perfect working condition, the family had lost the remote control for it and decided to move on to something newer than 2005 technology. Of course, as I said I have the Logitech harmony which can be programmed to control anything. So now I can have 400 DVDs cued up (and by the way it has a HDMI output), furthermore it can also play CDs and even MP3 discs.
VLC is great for playing ISO files on a PC, if you want to do that, and the nice thing about putting the ISO files onto a NAS is you can access them from anywhere. This is far superior to every "cloud" service there is, for many reasons -- the most important of which is that I don't have to pay some company to store and serve files that my NAS is already perfectly equipped to do. Or to question my judgment in dubbing content from DVDs that I own and decide to access over the internet; or to go out of business (or get raided by the authorities) and wipe out my data collection (ahem, "Mega Upload").