DVD player does not play DVDs mounted on other macs via airport

[aicul]

Hi,

I noticed tht if I set up a airport network and use mac A to log into mac B with an admin account, I will see all mounted devices of mac B.

Ok, now assume I mounted a DVD on mac B. Using mac A, and login, Il see the loaded DVD on mac B. Now if I use DVD player on mac A and tell it to use the DVD on mac B it does't complain. But it also doesn't show anything on the screen.

However, if I insert a CD on ,mac B instead of a DVD, I can see the contents of the CD via airport on mac A.

Anyone have a explanation why the DVD doesn't play on mac A?

 

[Giaguara]

Because it is not intended to? Just like you can't do certain things like install from certain DVDs even using Remote Desktop ..?

 

[aicul]

Because it is not intended to?

This surprises me. Maybe I expected a "airport does not have the through-put", but a "not intended to" leaves me blank.

After all, I'm only tring to stream video through a network, nothing magical about this.

 

[scruffy]

the DVD player application relies on the DVD drive doing some of the decoding itself, in hardware. The app takes the partially decoded stream from the hardware, and puts it on the screen. Mounting the drive via the network you get the raw bits on the disk - no hardware decoding.

Look into videolan (www.videolan.org) to do this. Just be aware that a DVD drive does a lot of work - bypassing the drive's acceleration and doing all the decoding in software (as videolan does), the processor requirements are much higher. I can watch DVDs fine on my 300MHz G3 with DVD Player.app; using Videolan would never work with such an old computer.

 

[aicul]

the DVD player application relies on the DVD drive doing some of the decoding itself, in hardware.

Learnt something new today. Will look into your product. Thanks for clarifying this aspect of DVDs to me.