Battleangel

.. is that they generally have some sort of copy protection. Also, if you play them using a computer you will very soon find out just how limiting the technology is as far as networking is concerned. Put simply, there is no practical way in hell to stream data from a DVD over a network to a client or a HTPC player. Well, people have told me to try the Xing player (discontinued after it allegedly led to the discovery of the deCSS code) but I’d rather not, it is really old and has got an ugly interface. Suggestion number two is to copy the content (which requires hacking the CSS coding as well) to the hd and stream it from there .. practical only if you got like 8GB of free space and 20min to spare.
So, what do you do? In my case I found it useful to have all cd/dvd drives in the same setup and therefore am a bit reluctant to go back to having a dvd in the HTPC (I still have to use RemoteAdmin on it since I don’t have a wireless keyboard/mouse and my Realmagic remote is working like crap). Not a big problem, more like temporary one on the way to the perfect HTPC setup. Anyway, I found this interesting project that adds some fascinating streaming possibilities:

VideoLAN ” VideoLAN is a project of French students from the École Centrale Paris and developers from all over the world. Its main goals is MPEG streaming on a network, but it also features a standalone multimedia player. The VideoLAN Server can stream video read from a hard disk, a DVD player, a satellite card or an MPEG 2 compression card, and unicast or multicast it on a network. The VideoLAN Client can read the stream from the network and display it. It can also be used to display video read locally on the computer : DVDs, VCDs, MPEG and DivX files and from a satellite card. It is multi-plaform : Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, QNX, iPaq “

But as joyful as it was, it lasted only so long, until I read the notes:
Warning : The Windows version of vls can only stream MPEG files stored on a hard drive. It cannot stream DVDs, satellite channels or real-time MPEG encoded videos.
Ahhhhh. I should probably stop wasting my time and get a remote control solution, move the G400 over and stop playing around. Hmm, maybe I should just purchase a wireless mouse .. it should work, right? (as long as I can see the desktop .. which in turn requires that I toss the H+ out the window).