VLC playing files using a home airport network

[jagoras]

I have a collection of music dvd`s files in the hard disk of my G5. I used to watch the dvd`s files using a projector wich is in another room, connected to a powerbook using airport level g and VLC. I do that just reading the files using apple talk. The problem is that some times I suffer some freezes and interruptions. I would like to improve the quality of the transmission avoiding using VLC in the G5 as a server . Some ideas?

[fkuehne]

AppleTalk is a quite old and slow protocol with a huge overhead, so it isn't that good for this purpose. Additionally, it'll have problems with handling files of such a size (remember: it was created in a time when hard-disk were smaller than 1 GB, in the Mac OS 7.x series to be precise).

You could set up another instance of VLC on the G5 which streams your DVD on your local network. Your powerbook receives the stream and displays it.
This isn't that hard to implement, since you can easily stream the normal DVD content on your network without having to bother about bandwidth (therefore no transcoding needs to be done).
The easiest way to go is probably simply streaming the DVD to a multicast address (a special ip-address which can be compared to a frequency of a radio-station) and tell your PowerBook to play the data on this address. Other users of your LAN can access this stream as well. If you want to prevent this, you should unicast the DVD to the IP of your PowerBook.

Please have a look at the following documents for details: "VLC Streaming-Howto" and "VLC streaming". Notice that no streaming-wizard exist for the OSX-port yet and that the wxwindows-interface is Windows/Linux only. The latter document should be interesting for you anyway, because it explains various terms I mentioned above in detail.