DVD playback from network drive

[Cogs]

Has anyone had any success playing DVDs from a networked DVD drive? I have found that DVD menus sometimes display properly, but the actual video consists of very blocky and mostly green graphics. There shouldn't be any bandwidth problems as it's a 100Mb network, and I can copy *.vob files over the network way faster than realtime.

Is this related to CSS encryption as mentioned in the Matrox FAQs and if so is there any way around it?

BTW, I'm using the player software bundled with the G400.

[Cogs]

I can play 2451KB/s AVIs over the network with no problems whatsoever, and just for the hell of it I tried copying the same file forward and back over the network while it was playing. It didn't miss a beat.

Isn't the DVD video data rate about 1400KB/s max? Surely the data can be reconstructed at the other end by the software.

[IceStorm]

Guess I'll try it when I get home. DVD's on both machines - Matrox player on the PIII, and dxr3 on the P200. I've a 100Mbit switch (Linksys - don't laugh, it was cheap), and both of my network cards are configured for 100Mbit, full duplex operation.



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Primary System: PIII-540 (450@4.5x120), Soyo 6BA+ III, 2x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, G400 MAX in multi-monitor mode. V2 SLI rig. Two Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u monitors, 3Com 3C905, SoundBlaster Live!, DeskTop Theater DTT2500 DIGITAL Speaker System (Sweeeeeet!), WD AC41800 18GB HD, WD AC310100 10GB HD, Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD-ROM, HP 8100i CD-RW, Epson Stylus Pro, OptiUPS PowerES 650, MS SideWinder Precision Pro USB joystick, Logitech 3-button mouse, Mitsumi keyboard, Win98 SE, Belkin OmniCube 4-port KVM, 10/100 5-port Linksys Ethernet switch (30~40MB/min under Win98SE)

Secondary System: PII-266, Asus P2B BIOS 1008, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium II, 3Com 3C590, ADSL Modem 640kbit down/90kbit up, 3Com 3C509, Mylex BT-930 SCSI card, Seagate 2GB Hawk, NEC 6x CD-ROM, Linux distro S.u.S.E. 6.1 (IP Masquerade works!), Sharp JX-9400 LJ-II compatible

Tertiary System: DFI G568IPC Intel 430HX chipset, P200MMX, 4x64MB EDO Parity RAM, Millennium II, Intel Pro/100+ client NIC, SoundBlaster 16 MCD, Fujitsu 3.5GB HD, WD 1.2GB HD, Creative Dxr3 DVD decoder card, Hitachi GD-2500 6x DVD-ROM, Win98 SE

All specs subject to change.

[st63z]

I plan to do that myself and am also interested in making it work. Just curious, have you tried playing an MPEG-2 file from a networked HDD? How about trying to burn a CD-R(W) at 4X speed (600 KB/sec) or above from a networked source (HDD/CD-ROM)? It may shed some light into the source of the problem...

--Paul

[MultimediaMan]

There's a little more to it than that. Sure, you might have a 100 Megabit ethernet connection, but actual throughput is more like 50 Megabits unless you happen to have a network switch or dedicated port routing. Add to that a typical NIC only has a 6 kb data buffer, and the data will need to be translated from the Ethernet bitstream to an actual .vob or mpeg2 "file" in the buffer, and you can see where problems may arise.