Play DVD Over Network

[Travis]

Do any of you guys know of a DVD player that will play movies over a network? I have WinDVD and PowerDVD and neither one is capable of doing this (not to my knowledge). Thanx for any suggetions.


Trav

 

[GL]

Rip the DVD to unencrypted VOB files and try your luck playing those. I haven't had great success. The movie plays but often the soundtrack messes up between the end of one VOB and the beginning of the next.

-GL

 

[Travis]

Thanx but I wanted to not have to rip the DVD to the hard drive.


Trav

 

[Wizkid]

Well you won't be able to play any encrypted movies over the network without decrypting them first, and that requires ripping them to the hard drive.

The problem is that the program (dvd-player) needs access to the drive to get the decryption key, that's why no programs will work over the network if the DVD is encrypted

 

[Que-TiP]

i dont have a dvd player, but wouldn't it work by simply sharing the dvd drive over the network and mounting (map network drive) it by the computer you want to play it on?? theoretically it seems like it would work...i hope you have a 100Mbit switch though..please inform me if i am wrong...just curious

-Alex
ayzenber@msu.edu

 

[Travis]

I tried sharing it and that did not work and yes I do have a 100/10 switch. The encryption is something I did not think about and makes a lot of sense thanks.


Trav

 

[vailman]

What about good ol' Windows Media Encoder? I've streamed video from my TV tuner to other computers on my little LAN. The quality video/sound quality is pretty crappy (depends on the quality of the computers and network connections) but there's no reason it wouldn't work.

 

[WoundedWallet]

I have played it trough the network, but I can't say whether the DVD was encrypted or not.

How can you tell?

 

[Xe0n]

well, if you rip it to vob files the files must be in a folder thats called video_ts in a root drtive (eg. c:\video_ts\)

also, many ripping programs will combine all of the vob files, but only if its a ntfs drive, due to the 4 gig file limit on fat32

 

[Czar]

Try a program called CladDVD I think or CladRip, cant remember, its the best ripping program I know of, you might also want to divx the movies, saves space and bandwith.

 

[Workin']

I have used WinDVD to play DVD's over a network. Share the DVD drive on the the machine that has it, then map it to a drive letter on the network machine, then tell WinDVD to use that drive. It's easiest if you have the drive mapping set up before you install WinDVD.

However, some DVD's won't play because of the way their menus are constructed. And playback over my 10Mb/s non-switched network was unwatchably jumpy. If you have a 100Mb switched network you should be OK. I ended up just buying a DVD drive for the other computer.

 

[beat mania]

with the Hollywood+ card and software you can use any dvd drive on the network.