Having problems streaming DVD from harddisk.

[Mark Burke]

Hi,

I am trying to stream a DVD from my PC's harddisk. The copy was made using DVDShrink and should be identical to the original, except I removed the regional settings i.e. it is region free.

When I start VLC on the server side and request that its streams over HTTP, the DVD displays locally on the PC and doesn't seem to stream at all. I have had success streaming a simple .mpeg file so I feel that my configuration is ok.

I know I probably haven't given enough details here, but has anyone managed to do this or is there some know issues with streaming from harddisk. In short what I am trying to do is build a library of DVD's on a PC and access them remotely with a Macintosh connected t oa TV using S-Video.

Any pointers or suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

[Nanocore]

Unfortunately, this is a me too with the hope of garnering a possible reply. I too am attempting to build the same sort of set up, and would like to stream from a file server to the display machine (hooked to a projector for a home theater setup). By using the streaming server, I am in hopes that it will be able to stream to other machines on my home network.

The last resort is to mount them, but I was hoping to take advantage of any caching/buffering that might be more inherent in the vlc software that directly supports streaming video. If the developers of VLC read this and can comment on whether this is a good assumption, then it might save more of these posts to the forum.

[Mark Burke]

Hi Nanocore,

I've done a little more research into my problem and have gotten a little more insight which appears to indicate that this may be a possible bug in the windows version of VLC.

I manually copied the DVD from my PC (which is running W2K) to my Mac and tried to stream from the Mac back to the PC i.e. I reversed the streaming direction. This seemed to work a lot better i.e. it didn't display locally and the streaming worked, at least for a while. It worked quite happily for a few minutes and then seemed to hang on the PC. I think this may have been something to do with the screen saver kicking in on the Mac or perhaps even the Mac going to sleep - not quite sure as I didn't get a chance yet to look at the problem in more detail.

Regarding your problem did you experiment with the transcoding settings. BTW I had absolutely no success until I enabled this.

Any comments from anyone at Videolan please ?

Thanks,
Mark

[markfm]

DVDs are in MPEG2, roughly 6 - 8 Mbps as a "typical" value.

HTTP is a connection-oriented ACK'd protocol. You're acking all these subsidiary packets which each contain no more than 1500 bytes, typically.

If I wanted to stream a DVD, I would definitely switch to UDP (cuts out the ACKs), and quite likely go to transcoding, MPEG4 video, 2 or 3 Mbps.

It'll be important to have a clean source image -- defragment your hard disk. You can adjust the file input cache a bit, maybe nudge it up slightly to smooth any disk access problems on the server side. If you're serving UDP, there's a UDP stream output cache that you can also control.

[Nanocore]

I was actually using the UDP stream option in the attempt to get it to work (ie just to get the server to serve a stream to the remote client). That is where I picked up the option to buffer and thought that might be what I was looking for.

Now if I can just ge the menus to work for those "dvds on hard drive" with the windows client (just playing on the server).