Also something that will help your success is using NEtbeui between machines instead of TCP/IP. NetBeui is a little faster on lans and has less overhead. I recall givinb someone that advice before that was trying to do HD over the network, and he had no success before with TCP/IP and Netbeui allowed him to do it. I would think though that as long as your 2 machines are running at 100 full that you shouldn't have any issues with a small stream like a DVD.
if you are going back to back with your machines then you may also want to consider getting new Gigabit Ethernet cards. They are farely cheap now. I just picked up 2 for 60 a piece. I'm going to get a new Hard drive and play with streaming HD from one pc to another.
I have no problem playing VOBs over my LAN. I have 2 100 mb/s nics in my HTPC, one connected to my cable modem and the other connected to a hub. I have my laptop connected to this hub and have watched several movies with both Windvd and Zplayer with no problems at all. I can also watch DVD's directly from my dvd drive, which is shared on the lan. The only problem is that only non-copy protected dvd's play, such as Avia will play directly from the drive.
You certainly have more than enough horsepower for this task. I have a 40 gig and an 80 gig 5400 rpm maxtor drives, non-raid. I am running win2k server, but I am sure win2k professional would work just as well. I only have tcp/ip protocol enabled. Can you be more specific about what exactly you are experiencing when you attempt to watch a VOB over the lan?
I see you have a hub in there. Hubs force your network cards into half duplex mode . This means that only one PC can transmit at a time, so if you have any other devices on the LAN they could well be causing collisions and interupting the stream.
A couple of things to try are to use a program like Anyspeed to see what transfer rate you are actuallt getting and then connect the two PCs in question back-to-back via a cross-over ethernet cable. Then make sure they both can autosense the speed and duplex and you should get a 100MB full duplex conenction.
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