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A Challenge for you! (playing a DVD across a network)

A

AMD4ME2

Senior member
is it possible to share a DVD drive on a local network and have the movie play on another computer? I had a friend of mine try this with his setup and could not get it to work..

what I want to do is put a computer out in the living room with TVout and connect it to my network.. but have the DVD drive in my main system in another room. is it possible? has anyone done this?

The Challenge is on!
 
I believe so, i know of people that (well, i havent seen it, but i trust em)do it...but they were only on a 10Mbit network, so it got a little jumpy he said ....mind you, that could have been the 233 laptop...LMAO 🙂
 
I using the dvd drive on my laptop over the network to play DVDs and it works like a charm. Simply map the DVD drive to your pc.
BTW am using 100BaseTX.

-MeliK
 
Yep, MelikK is right. I've done it also but I'd HIGHLY suggest you have a 100Mbps network as a DVD stream can get up to 50Mbps+ (on average it is around 6-8Mbps). 😉
 
I do that all the time, and only on a 10 mb network. I can play movies from off the computer in my room and put them through the H+ in my lounge computer to the TV with no problems, at most I have maybe 2 or 3 half second pauses throughout the whole movie. But maybe I'm just lucky (?).
 
Well, the person i mentioned was doing this across a university campus so there would no doubt hav been a lot of activity and potential bottle necks for him...but is still reckon its the sh1t laptop that was the problem, hehe 🙂

I have to say, ive never heard it mentioned a DVD can take up to 50Mbps, was under the impression average was approx 6 and a taxing scene was up to 9...
 
Here goes some theory:

Please correct me if I'm wrong but the max transfer rate of a 1X DVD drive is around 1.32 Mbytes/sec. 10baseT ethernet maxes out at 1.25 Mbytes/sec. So, even if your 10baseT ethernet is completely uncongested and free from protocol traffic overhead (which it probably isn't), the network can't support the FULL transfer rate of a DVD movie.

However, lucky for us, DVD movies don't typically use up the entire transfer rate of the DVD spec because MPEG2 compression rocks our world. I don't know what the maximum bitrate of a DVD movie is (including both the audio and video streams), but it has to be less than the max transfer rate of a 1X DVD drive. Therefore, 10 Mbps ethernet will work fine MOST of the time, but won't cover all the bases.

Going with IEEE 802.3u 100baseT should work just fine.
 
I was under the impression that most DVD's were encrypted. How are you guys doing this? Are you sharing the DVD drive, mapping it on the "client" computer, and then playing the files in a playlist? I tried that once with Top Gun (over a switched 100mbit network) and couldn't get anything to play, but perhaps I am missing something?

~bex0rs
 
I tried it with win2k, 100meg switched network and windvd with no luck, I mapped the drive, pointed it over and it plays the opening screen and shuts off every time.
 
Please help.

I've tried the mapping and the sharing and installing dvd software in client machine but no luck playing the movies.

I'm frustrated with it.
 


<< I don't know what the maximum bitrate of a DVD movie is (including both the audio and video streams) >>

As you stated, the maximum DVD movie bitrate is about 1.32 MBps, or about 10.54Mbps. For movies with Dolby Digital soundtracks, the audio is allocated a maximum of 384kbps total (or about 3-1/2% of the total) for all channels combined. DTS soundtracks get up to 1.5Mbps (or about 14% of the total) for all channels combined. The video gets the rest. So you see the video gets by far the lion's share of bandwidth.
 
If you &quot;Map Network Drive&quot; then you should be able to play it no problem at all. Just right click the drive and select &quot;Play&quot; or open your software DVD play and then select the drive to play from etc...

Thorin
 
I have power DVD and whichever one comes with ATI Radeon. I will try the whole mapping thing again this afternoon.
 
Thorin that is exactly what I did though, with windvd, and it would load the fbi warning on the begining of the movie then shut off, for every movie I tried, figured it was the protection or something.
 
&quot;Thorin that is exactly what I did though, with windvd, and it would load the fbi warning on the begining of the movie then shut off, for every movie I tried, figured it was the protection or something. &quot;

Strange....I'll do some digging and see if I can find an answer for you.

Thorin
 
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