[TriLUG] Networked DVD drive

[Bill Farrow]

Hi,
Over the weekend I was trying out some tools to allow my MythTV box in
the living room to access a DVD drive in my office desktop.

The first idea was to use the Network Block Device (nbd) kernel driver
and tools to provide network access to the /dev/dvd device.  This
works up to the point where libdvdcss tries to send ioctl's to the
device.

The second attempt was to apply a networking patch to libdvdcss that
sends all drive commands over a tcp socket.  I got to the point where
I could play a DVD over the network using a gstreamer command, but I
couldn't get mplayer or mythfrontend to connect.  I might have to keep
trying along these lines...
  http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/libdvdcss-devel/2003-March/000237.html

Has anyone else done something like this ?  I'm open to help, maybe
even a hacking session.

Bill