Playing DVD movies on a computer that doesn't have a DVD drive

Z

zort15

New Member
I was wondering if there was a simple and quick way to play DVD moives on a computer that doesn't have a DVD drive.

I built a computer that serves as a media server for our appartment, but it only has 160 GB hard drive space total between two drives. I want to add two 160 GB drives (bringing the grand total to 480 GB:D ), but in order to do that I would need to take out all of the optical drives (no SATA on this comp :( ).

My main desktop, and my laptop both have DVD drives. I was wondering if there was a way I could share one of those drives on the network and have the media server believe that it's a local DVD drive.

I would prefer to not have to rip the movies, because DVD images take up a lot of space, and take a lot of time to transfer via a 100 MB network. It also takes to long to rip them to movie files.
 
i dont know how that can work and if there is a way, probably there is, but have yet to find it. i googled but nothing. the only reason i can think of is like you said, rip the file on the notebook and play the file through your network with something like videolan.

other than that, you can just get an external dvd rom player.
 
It does not take that much of the time to transfer huge files within home network, maybe about 10 to 15 minutes..

I have wireless Linksys router and Access point and I transfer movie files over my other computers within my Home Network,, and it takes about 10 minutes for me to transfer a 5 G.B of a movie...
 
Im not sure if this would work, but maybe it would. Set up your laptop, or computer with a dvd drive, as a server and then share the dvd drive.
 
Motoxrdude said:
Set up your laptop, or computer with a dvd drive, as a server and then share the dvd drive.
Click to expand...

I have a dvd drive on my w-network and i can watch movies on all my computers :)
 
It would work, but a better way would be to just buy a cheap PCI IDE controller card, and make use of the extra channels (allowing you to connect up to 8 drives).
 
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