Dvd playing over a windows network

[Francisco J. León]

Is it possible to play a dvd over a network? Even more restrictive, can
the machine hosting the dvd drive use Windows, and let linux use it?

The most i have been able to do, is share the dvd drive over samba and
play yhe .vob files.

I have read some info about setting the dvd writer as a raw device, but
since the drive is not in my machine i dont know if this would work

Francisco J. León A.
VII Semestre de Lic. en Computación
Maracaibo, Edo. Zulia, Venezuela

[Loïc Minier]

Post by Francisco J. León
Is it possible to play a dvd over a network? Even more restrictive, can
the machine hosting the dvd drive use Windows, and let linux use it?

The goal of VideoLAN is to stream video across a network, including
DVD. It is possible to play a dvd over a network but it is currently
not so easy to remote control a DVD on a windows host. Here's what you
can do with current videolan software:

- launch a VLS (videolan server) on a linux OS to stream a DVD to any
number of hosts (all hosts will be seing the same video at the same
time) and control the vls via telnet, ssh or http.

- launch a VLS on a windows machine and stream VOBs. Streaming the DVD
under windows is in beta as far as I understood.

- launch a VLC (videolan client) on a windows or linux host and let it
stream to any number of hosts via the new Stream Output function (since
0.5.0). You'll be able to control the VLC process on the streaming side
but it is a bit tricky to remote control it (I could summarize more on
this if you're interested).

Post by Francisco J. León
The most i have been able to do, is share the dvd drive over samba and
play yhe .vob files.

The problem is to send special controls to the DVD drive to
descramble the tracks, and samba/netbios or normal network protocols
like FTP don't allow this.
The only thing you can do is launching a vlc or a vls to unlock the
DVD and then share the files via a normal network protocol, for example
you might use a web server to share the VOB over http.
Sharing the files permits multiple persons to watch different parts
of the same movie at the same time. If you try to stream with vlc or
vls, all clients will see the same movie at the same position.


HTH,