DVD players that can play files over network from PC.

[yomomma]

There are several network-attached DVD players out there, Kiss, Gateway, Oritron NPD3117 that can stream video from the hard drive on a PC over your home network (wired or wierless ethernet). There are also some media servers like the Play@TV accomplish the same thing.

The problem is that all these devices require you to recode the movies as DivX or similar format. They will not play a DVD using the native .NFO and .VOB files. (although many software DVD players like PowerDVD will) Many have artificial bitrate limits.

Sure I can recode the movies to DivX... but a good many I want to retain the extras and menus as well as sound options.

I want a networked DVD player or networked media player that can play movies that I have ripped to the hard drive (either as .ISO files or to .NFO and .VOB files with CSS/Macrovision removed). Anyone have suggestions?

[eas]

Interesting question.

There are plenty of MPEG2 based network playback devices, like the Huappage MediaMVP. I don't know if they can work directly with VOBs or ISOs, but they should at least be able to work without requiring rencoding.

Actually, given the way some of them work, it seems like it should be possible to have PCside software to do any necessary bitstream manipulation on the fly (which isn't to say that such software exists).

[yomomma]

While Huappage and others can play MPEG2 VOBs w/o recoding, the don't play menus and extras.

The Molino Media Mogul promises to do the whole DVD w/ menus, but it doesn't stream... it will only run off its own internal HD (and they want $3K for it)

Linksys is coming out with a DVD player that will play media from a PC over ethernet, but the specs don't give me much hope.

[yomomma]

Actually I don't mind recoding... I will be transcoding the DVDs anyway to reduce them in size. The problem is losing the menus and extras.

Unless... does someone have a way to recode to Divx that retains the menus, multi-audio, and extras?