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Hi,

I now have 4 different media players installed, but not one does everything it should.

The ones that see my UPnP server can't play sounds on VOBs, the others, that apparently will play everything, don't see myUPnP server.

I have the codec pack installed.

Media Player can see my UPnp server, but it wont play the audio on ripped DVDs VOB files.

SiB/mplayer can see my mapped drive, but playback is slow, un-useably slow, not even shakey playback, it freezes. completely

Canola can't see my UPnp server, or mapped drives.

MediaBox won't play audio on VOBs.

Is there anything that will see a UPnp server and play all formats properly? I have read that Canola can be used with UPnp servers, can anyone tell me how as I can't find any info on configuring Canola to do this?

In theory, MediaBox could use mplayer as media backend. But this has not been tested on the N900 yet.
But as you said, mplayer is slow on the VOBs. The best choice would be to get the gstreamer codec for the audio format installed on the N900, if available (DTS DCA or AC-3 or whatever your DVD uses).

Transcode your DVD VOBs to a more modern format. MPEG-2 isn't really state of the art anymore, there are more space-efficient (and higher quality, which means no/not much quality loss compared to the MPEG-2 source) codecs out there. Also, there's little use in having AC-3 sound (maybe that's why Media Player can't play your files?) with a stereo speaker device / stereo headphones / stereo line-out.

For example, there's Handbrake which is an easy-to-use DVD ripping utility, and I'm sure you get good encoding settings for your N900 if you search this forum (on the other hand, the N900 plays almost any "700MB movie" that you throw at it, so a off-the-shelf 700MB DVD movie rip should be no problem at all).

Apart from compatibilty with your N900, you will also gain more space on your UPnP share and an easier file structure (multiple strangely-named VOBs versus a single .avi/.mkv/.ogv file).