PCA Forums

My dad just got a 19" Viewsonic on his P3 in the other room that doesn't have a DVD drive. I want to watch movies on his computer using a network drive from my computer. I figure because these drives are much slower than 100mbps it shouldn't be a problem. However, I am running XP home and he is running win2k. I can't find a way to watch it from his computer. I can run executables from the drive and stuff, but i can't watch a DVD. Windows Media player doesn't do anything, and Power DVD doesn't let me select anything other than an onboard drive. Anyone have any ideas?

Depends on your DVD software. You *may* be able to do it with PowerDVD. You share his drive then instead of playing from a DVD setup PowerDVD to play VOB files from a directory and browse to his shared drive.

Other DVD players may or may not allow you to play a VOB file from a directory.

Then again, it's not like a DVD drive costs much: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... WSE&depa=1

Oh I know they are cheap, but I'm doing this just because I'm curious. I'd watch it on the home theater normally, i just wanted to see what the monitor looked like. Anyways, thanks, i'll try to get PowerDVD to play the VOB files.

And it might not work.. But have you tried mapping the DVD drive on the other comp as a local drive? eGo

^ Good call... I didn't even think to try that. Wow I'm stupid Thanks.

Heh.. Who knows, it might not even work.. heh.. But, hopefully it does.. GL!

Hmmm.... i'm shocked to find that this didn't work. It will certainly make it easier once i get things working, but PowerDVD only plays from DVD-roms. How do you get PowerDVD to play VOB files?There is an option called "default DVD-ROM drive" and i can't change anything in it because this computer only has a single CD-Rom. I've tried opening the VOB files with PowerDVD with no luck. Any other ideas?

Hmmm, actually, just opened a different VOB file and it was "working". It was very scrambled with some green squares and jerky sound. I guess that means the network just isn't fast enough? That is weird, because DVD has to be less than 20mbps, because that is what HDTV is... and I'm on 100mbit network. Hmmm, oh well.

Although the network may (in theory) be fast enough (and true bandwidth performance varies greatly depending on a lot of factors) the problem is likely to be throughput issues (the host system has to cache data from the DVD and send it to you via the network, and depending what background apps are running it may be hiccuping too much to work right).

It's really not designed to do what you're trying to do.

Here is a free one for Linux. I'm still looking for a windows alternative.

http://www.videolan.org/