Can I Play a Blu Ray Movie over my network?

[jacktesterson]

I have two PC's listed below.

My HTPC has a Blu Ray drive, My Gamer doesn't. I could go spend $50 on a Reader to be able to watch on my 37" incher, but before I do, I was wondering if its possible to simply Share my Blu Ray drive in my HTPC, and be able to play Discs in that drive on my gaming PC using the shared Drive? I own Power DVD 10 Ultra and use that for software. Also these PC's are connected by a Gigabit Lan.

I can't seem to get PowerDVD 10 Ultra to recognize the shared drive that I have mapped.

Any ideas?

Both PCs are running Windows 7 Home Premium X64

 

[RebateMonger]

Edit: I'm probably wrong with this answer....see below.

First, I don't own a Blu-ray player and probably never will. But....

I doubt that you can. At least not in "hi-definition" directly from a Blu-Ray disk. Probably could with a lower resolution signal or by decrypting the disk.

The reason would be the HDCP copy protection. It's designed to ensure that every part of the path between the Blu-Ray disk and the screen is encrypted with appropriate encryption. Since your network wouldn't be, I think it'd refuse to send it in "hi-def" mode.

 

[guyver01]

If you can share the optical drive across the network and have an adequate LAN connectiom you should be able to.

Blu-ray is max 54Mbps so you could play it over a 100Mb network. I wouldn't even try with a 10BaseT connection.

 

[RebateMonger]

If you can share the optical drive across the network and have an adequate LAN connectiom you should be able to.

So you're saying that as long as the data is streamed across the network BEFORE it's processed by the computer's Blu-Ray player software, it's not subject to restrictions on encryption? That sounds reasonable. So I'm likely wrong in my earlier answer.

 

[guyver01]

As long as the data is streamed across the network BEFORE it's processed by the computer's Blu-Ray player software, it's not subject to restrictions on encryption?

The software on your computer is decrypting the information on a network mount point. You're streaming the data.

Your Blu Ray DVD player software on your pc decrypts the data. You're not playing it on the network mount point... you're playing it on your own computer.

It's no different than reading an encrypted file on a network share drive, and decrypting it on your computer.

You're not copying the stream, which is where HDCP comes into play.

 

[jacktesterson]

How do I get PowerDVD to recognize the shared drive? Any ideas?

Thats my issue....

 

[PolishBomber]

I recently went through this with standard DVDs on my home Win XP network. Windows Media Player (media sharing) will not allow you to share a disc across the network. I'm thinking this limitation might be built into PowerDVD as well, or maybe it's windows that won't allow it?

Not 100% sure but I think this is why it is so common for people to rip their movie collections onto a media drive in single-file formats like mkv or mpg or avi. You can stream videos that way very easily to any PC or DLNA device.

Another option would be to decrypt and make an ISO image of your blu-ray disc. Disc image files can be shared over the network very easily and then you can mount the image on a different machine (using powerISO or the like). However that may not help you because it takes a lot of time/energy and storage space

 

[guyver01]

How do I get PowerDVD to recognize the shared drive? Any ideas?

Thats my issue....

make sure the share drive is mapped as a drive letter.

 

[jacktesterson]

make sure the share drive is mapped as a drive letter.

Yeah doesn't help. Has been since the start.

I think the original response is correct from the reading I've done. I haven't found somebody to make this work online.

 

[jacktesterson]

I ended up buying a ps3, wanted grand turismo 5