I am looking for a technical solution.
If I add a DVD-equipped PC to my home network, I will be able to view DVD movies on that machine.
What would I have to do to pipe the movies elsewhere on the network? I’ve got 100 MB capabilty to other rooms; seems to me there ought to be a way to do this without having a DVD drive on each and every computer.
Thoughts?
Well I am not sure about broadcasting the actual DVD movie while it is playing from the disk. Let me tell you what I did and the problems I had and maybe it will help you.
What I have is a program which will rip dvd movies off of a dvd and create a file. So what I did was have my Linux server broadcast this as a Quicktime movie on my home network and then I could watch it on the other computers. But there are a whole buch of problems. First, I could not get sound to work. I have no idea why, the damn thing just wouldn’t broadcast the sound. Second, I had to really make the movie small so that it could be streamed through my network. I have a 100baseT network but you still have to scale the movie down so that it would stream correctly. Even then I would lose some frames every now and then. Overall it took about an hour (I think, I don’t quite remember) to rip the DVD and then about another hour of compression and coverting before i finally got a file I could stream. And then I had no sound. As you may guess I gave up on that little project.
Good Luck
-N
This is an interesting question. But I don’t think that the network data stream is fast enough. But you could put a video card with a/v inputs on the other computer & run the signal into the computer that way. Not very practical though.
Let me know if you come up with any other ideas.
Rick, check out Tom’s Hardware Guide for articles on converting your movies to MPEG 4. It gives you about a 10:1 or 11:1 compression with only a slight loss in quality.
BTW, you only have 100 Mb (megabits) not 100 MB (megabytes) on your network. That is, unless you spent several hundred dollars apiece on NICs. That should still be plenty fast to stream MPEG4. I don’t think you’ll be able to get a good stream directly off a DVD.
You could share the DVD drive on the network and use a software MPEG decoder/player to view the movies, but I agree with Frogstein, you network is not fast enough to support smooth playback.