watching dvd over network.

[hoihtah]

i'd like to share my dvd-rom over lan. and watch from another computer.
is this possible?
can we share dvd-roms as a network dvd-roms... rather than network drives?

 

[Garion]

Nope, I'm afraid not - DVD software won't read from a network drive, only a local drive. Copyright and copy potection kicking in, I'm afraid.. The only way to do it is to rip it to hard disk, then view it - A real pain.

- G

 

[manly]

I haven't done the math, but it'd also be difficult to get the necessary bandwidth from Fast Ethernet.

Just encode to DivX ;-) with a powerful PC.

 

[Garion]

Assuming that a full DVD is 6GB and is 90 minutes long, you only need a maximum of 11Mb/s to play it.. Well within the capabilites of a 100BaseT NIC.

- G

 

[wedi42]

check out www.videolan.org/

 

[Torghn]

I've gotten a DVD to play over a net work, but it was unbeliveably chopy. I just shared the DVD drive, mapped the dirve to a letter on the other computer I wanted to play it on, then told winDVD that that drive was my DVD drive. It belived me and played the DVD, but it was too chopy to watch. (Both computers where 1700+s with a 100mb full dublex connection).

 

[Hoober]

I, too, have successfully shared out a DVD-ROM over a network but it was also so choppy and slow that it was unwatchable. I'm not really sure what the problem was... the computers were certainly fast enough. Its just easier to rip them to DivX now... so long as you have the harddrive space available. The compression on the encoding will usually let you get a movie down to 1GB with decent quality.

 

[spidey07]

<< I, too, have successfully shared out a DVD-ROM over a network but it was also so choppy and slow that it was unwatchable >>


Probably a buffer/interrupt/packet overhead thing or the fact that the player wasn't made to handle DVD data that way. I've done some pretty hard core video streaming and rip DVDs real-time into mpeg4 and watch with windows media player at work. perfectly smooth and full screen at 3-4 Mbs with multicast. Problem is the card required to rip real time is thousands of dollars.

oh well.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Solution: Buy some Citrix Software and make your DVD machine a Citrix Box...then you can logon with another system running the latest client and watch...not to mention, you can also get sound with Citrix. However, be sure to get yourself some fiber-optics and a gigabit ethernet card for each computer...probably TOO expensive if you buy a switch or any repeaters, but with that you should be able to do it.

 

[Hoober]

Yeah, I'm happy with DivX

 

[mgpaulus]

Here's another option, if you have HD space to burn: Virtual-CD. It allows you to create a Virtual DVD drive on the machine that wants to use the DVD. you then place a image of the DVD somewhere on your HD (Or Network), then you can play it from the virtual drive. With the network version, you can
have multiple machines accessing the image at the same time. One way to build a CDROM Farm w/o having to have all those CD Drives.

 

[Hoober]

I've used VirtualCD. Mainly for application CD's so i don't have to carry around a CD case when running calls and things. Very useful program if you have the harddrive space to spare. The compression on it isn't all that great, so you're going to be putting huge CD images on your hard drive... even bigger for DVD images.

 

[PlatinumGold]

you could do it via Terminal Services Client.

 

[Scarpozzi]

That's what Citrix is...it works off the Terminal Services backend... It's a very smooth and very effective application.

 

[PlatinumGold]

scarpozzi

ya , i know what citrix is.

i was just saying, if he can't afford a citrix solution, he can use W2k Server and client as Terminal Services is BUILT INTO W2k.

 

[Hoober]

But he'd need server. And term serv color in w2k is stuck at 256.

 

[manly]

And I doubt Citrix supports hardware-accelerated DVD playback.

You guys are pitching the wrong solution for the problem.

 

[skeletal29]

just use divx it would save alot of troubles!

 

[adlep]

Here is the idea:
on a small LAN it may be possible.....
Just do it like Torghn did but use a diffrient networking protocol such us NetBEUI, it will run faster than over TCP/IP because it
is much simpler and non routable??????
Regards,
adlep

 

[Woodchuck2000]

The problem is more one of continuity than of throughput. A sizeable buffer would be needed at the player end to cope with the inevitable dropped packets...

Netbeui would theoretically be faster over a small network because it has lower overheads, but since it's a broadcast protocol it is more likely to disrupt any other network activity than TCP/IP is.

I think, as someone rightly said, that Ripping it to divX then streaming it is a much better option (and one I've done myself at that) Even a <very> high quality DIVX rip is only gonna be 1.5 gigs.

The only drawback is that you're restricted to pro-logic sound and I'm a great fan of Dolby Digital...

Which begs the question; has anyone found a way of using DivX for the video and DD for the audio?

 

[watts3000]

We watch dvd's across the network all the time copy the dvd to a file server and map the network drive I don't know all that stuff these guys are saying about the video being choppy because last week our department which is about 60 users all watched a training dvd on .net and it rain smoothly the entire way through

 

[chuck2002]

It boils down to needing a minimum of a 100 megabit network running switched to the desktop. This setup "might" service one user watching a ripped DVD with both the server and workstation systems' networks being totally tapped out. 100 megabit is theoretical bandwidth, the actual bandwidth available is much less.

 

[manly]

<<
The only drawback is that you're restricted to pro-logic sound and I'm a great fan of Dolby Digital...

Which begs the question; has anyone found a way of using DivX for the video and DD for the audio? >>



I'm pretty sure you can mux DivX video with AC3 audio.

However, it doesn't make sense for me (and many others). DivX rips are expected to be less than DVD quality in both video and audio. You'd have to use up a lot more bitrate to keep AC3 audio (it'd be impossible to do a 1 CDR rip), and you'd probably have to steal bits from the video to accomplish this.

Finally, AC3 decoding is expensive, as is DivX decoding. A DivX + MP3 encoding will be a more "portable" format for yesteryear's computers.