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Streaming DVDs over a home network?

M

MattStone

Golden Member
Alright, I was screwing around today to see if I could stream a DVD from my laptop downstairs to my main machine upstairs. I was unabe though...is there a trick to this?

I shared the drive, but PowerDVD doesn't really recognize it as a drive, any help?

Thanks,
Matt
 
You can't map an optical drive and have it treated like a local drive in Windows. At least I'm not aware of a way. You can rip the DVD to your drive first then stream it.
 
Damn. That's what I figured. I would'a just ripped it, but out of my collective 110 gigs...I only have 9/10'ths of a gig free. Oh well.

Thanks anyway.
 
You can use Windows Media Encoder to capture the area of the screen where the DVD is playing. It will also capture the sound. It might be sort of laggy, but give it a try. Windows Media Encoder is free, btw. Search for it at microsoft.com.
 
a 100mbps network won't always go 100mbps. In fact, it may not go anywhere near 100mbps. You may wanna look into having some pretty top quality NIC's to make sure it may get up to 100 mbps. Also, a switch would help. As for directly streaming the video from the DVD. Normally, I would say it could be done, but DVD has that macrovision copy protection thing. So yes, you would need to rip it from the DVD. IDE drives aren't that expensive and you can just pool all of the DVD's on one central server and do a multicast stream from there (using windows media services in Win2k Server). In fact, with a 100mbps switch, you could even just open the file directly.
 
Having a 100Mbps LAN is essential to streaming DVDs through a network, but you'll only need 6-10Mbps of that bandwidth to get smooth playback. 😉

If you ask me, ripping the DVD to a hard drive would be MUCH better. Instead of swapping DVDs out of the drive, you can just load the *.vob files into PowerDVD and you'll be good to go. The only downside to this though is that you'll need A LOT of hard drive space. But hey, what do you think those 160GB drives are for. 😀 You can use DivX if you want to conserve space though.

 
has anyone else tried streaming dvd's with powerdvd? it really should work. ill try it in an hour or 2 when my bro gets home if no one else has tried
 
Yea, I have a setup similar to what imgod described. I map the the drives containing the ripped DVD on all my systems and stream the files. 100Mbps network is plenty fast even after overhead is subtracted, you only need 5-8Mbps to stream DVD's.
 
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