[vlc] does vlc play .iso files directly off the harddrive?

[Neil Bertram]

Scott Matthews wrote:
> Given that I was just asking about playing a DVD over a LAN via a shared
> drive -- which apparently cannot work -- I gather this is the next best way
> to try?
> 
> In other words, can I:
> 1) rip a DVD to a .iso file on a network share
> 2) mount and play that .iso over the network? (including menus, special
> features, etc?)
> 
> If so, what is an appropriate tool to use to rip the DVD to iso? (do I not
> need to decrypt it when doing so?)
> 
> thx,  -Scott
> 

Have you considered using VLC in a streaming setup to accomplish this?
It's fairly easy to run VLC on the remote machine and tell it to serve
the DVD (a particular title, anyway) over an MPEG-TS to your VLC client,
then play it from there.

Of course you wouldn't get menu support by doing this, so the usefulness
of this solution depends on how important that is to you.

In particular, have a look at this section of the manual:
http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch08.html

Or you can use the streaming wizard in current versions.

Another alternative is to rip the DVD to a directory, using one of the
many pieces of software that can do this, which should dump a decrypted
copy of the DVD that VLC will happily play over a network share (since
the remote decryption is the only tricky part). You can use File -> Open
Directory on the "VIDEO_TS" folder to do this, among other methods.


Neil