I'm all set to feed my mpeg movies to 3 PC's from my video server (via UW SCSI drives) on my home network using a FastEthernet Cisco switch. All PC's have S-video outs to the TV's they're connected to.

I don't want to believe that the only way to deliver the movies to the PC's is play them with PowerDVD, RealOne, MediaPlayer, etc on the client PC using a network share.

Won't this cause disk trashing on my server, inefficient use of the nework (using Netbeui protocol), and psuedo-streaming?

Any alternatives? (Without buying expensive server software)

Many thanks to those who reply.