The local area network at home uses Windows XP and we would like it to share a DVD drive. The drive can be shared over the network, but will not play DVDs remotely. The DVD software doesn’t seem to allow you to modify the default drive. Is there anyway around this or is there some other software that we could try?

This is a really good question, and I did some research to determine whether it is actually possible. When a DVD disc is copy protected (as is the case with most DVDs) then it isn’t straight forward to get DVD streaming over a network. DVDs are encrypted with a system called CSS (Content Scrambling System). The information on DVDs is encrypted to stop people from illegally copying the discs. Whenever you play a DVD, the video is decrypted then played. CSS will not allow the unencrypted video to be sent over an unsecure network. An open-source software package is available over the internet that can stream DVD video over a network. This software includes an unlicensed CSS decryptor to allow streaming DVD over a network. However, such unlicensed CSS decryption is probably illegal in Australia (as with most countries), so I don’t recommend that you use such software. Even if you did find a way to stream DVD video over a network, you will need to be using fast Ethernet (100 MBps or higher) as standard Ethernet (10 MBps) would not be fast enough to cope. My suggestion is that it would be much cheaper and safer to simply install a DVD drive on your other computers since a DVD-ROM drive only costs about $70.00. A source of information relating to your question and other DVD related issues, is the DVD FAQ located at dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html.