DVD playback via LAN...my situation is that of a poor man.

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Ok i cant afford another pc. Ive searched the forums but didnt find what i was looking for in regards to this.

The problem is that in the tv room, the computer does NOT accept agp 4x cards, only 2x. And my gcard that has svideo out is 4x...so it wont work in that computer.

So in the room with the 4x card, i already got the svideo and audio cable's through the wall to the tv room for playback. I used to use these cables for capturing video from satellite, now i want to use these cable for playback. The cables are ~30ft. each.

4x agp room pc = 4xY
TV room pc = tvZ

I want the tvZ computer to start playback of the DVD via cat 5. I want the dvdrom in tvZ computer aswell. So i stick in a dvd in tvZ, then tell 4xY to start the dvd in computer tvZ by reading the data from the dvdrom via cat5, then computer 4xY play's that dvd rom back through its svid/audio cables.

I can use either winxp or win2k for 1 or both computers.

Ive got the idea working in 1 way already. I can read the dvdrom from tvZ and play it back using 4xY via svid/audio, but i cant get tvZ to tell 4xY to start the dvd and play it back. So it can possibly work i assume.

The only thing that will be in tvZ will be the dvdrom, nic card, mouse/keyb. No monitor or anything else. Pretty much a computer with just a cat5 connected to it with a dvdrom in it. So the trick would be to use the autoinsert notification in tvZ to tell 4xY to start playing that dvd. Either that or everytime computer tvZ starts it automatically log's in to 4xY and displays either a GUI or shell via svideo to the tv in the tv room.

Cat5 i assume is basically just enough for DVD playback. It seems to work fine right now. I havent watched a full dvd using cat5 yet but it seems to play smoothly reading from the LAN dvdrom.

I dunno if anybody has got this to work. I understand spending like another 70-100usd to by a new mobo, cpu, ram would do the trick alot quicker, but im poor :-(. Another reason i want to do it like this is that i use the secondary display on 4xX to read e-books (the gcard supports a secondary DVi display).

[int 21h]

I briefly messed around for a bit...

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60797

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blam!! :-), that was fast. im about to read that link. actually what i said above is NOT correct. I forgot that im running a little .bat to copy all the files over to a dir on my local hdd with the 4x agp then playing them from there.

Off to read...hopefully good things

Just read that link, that is great news, but in my situation im not actually playing the video back via LAN.

You mentioned you got this to work with powerdvd...i cant do that.

Ive mapped the drive even, still powerdvd doesnt see it as a avail dvd to use. The dvd im tyring to use is encrypted, fight club orginal, store version :-)

[int 21h]

You can't read encrypted files over the network with conventional programs because you can't authenticate the drive to unlock the DVD.

So the only way to get around that is use an unconventional program... I guess I don't entirely understand your question because I thought you were pretty much trying to do the same thing I am.

[\AX]

It looked like to me you were/are trying to read the dvd from a computer via cat5, then playback that dvd on your pc via cat5. Sort of like a video server in ways.

Im trying to just get the computer that house's the dvdrom, to tell the another computer to start playing that dvd and send its output via svideo out on my card.

The dvd streams are only crossing the LAN to read, not output aswell.

Im fiddling with Videolan right now to see if it can work. i think im confused really. Im off to fiddle.

[int 21h]

Well, I had computer A and computer B. Computer B has a DVDRom, Computer A has the tvout. So I wanted to read the DVD on computer B, stream it to computer A to decode and display on the tv.

[\AX]

Ok that seems to be what im trying to do aswell.
I got videolan working via cmd line (havent tried the gui yet for config). It streams the dvd to my client machine and all is well with videlan and all that.

Problem is that my computer in the tv room, will not have a monitor hooked up to it. So i guess im going to use winxp on both machines. Using xp will make complications shorter than a 3rd party tool to do remote things i imagine.

There is still 1 complication on how im going to get a display. Like with the tv room computer, i need to login to the computer with the tvout. Then i need to start and be able to stop the videolan on the tvroom computer for streaming, and start the client videolan on the computer with the tvout.

Here's my plan of attack, if you got a better idea please mention it, because this seems bootleg and i dont even know if it will work right with tvout.

tvroom pc = A
pc with tvout = B

From A, everytime the machine starts, autologin via remote desktop connection to B. When that happens display that remote desktop back via svideo out. Then (this is where bootlegging happens), use computer B to login to computer A. This way i can control files on computer A with a gui of some sort from computer A (remember no monitor on computer A).

A -> B -> A

That's my idea in a nutshell. My concern is no longer with getting the dvd to strea (p.s. thank's to you :-P), but now its how im going to browse for control over the computer with the dvdrom. Since it has no monitor, im thinking about doing what i said. Just dont know how my tvout will like it. Or lan for that matter, might slow things down too much.

The only thing i need to really do on computer A, is start and stop the video lan, like when i change dvd's. Or skip through chapters and menus on the dvd.

[int 21h]

Well, in my opinion, the audio support in VideoLan is a little sketchy right now, so until that is worked out, I'm going to put this idea on the back burner, and maybe just get longer cords ;)