More on Streaming DVD's To Extenders
Update: Sadly, Windows Vista doesn't support DVD Streaming. Maybe one day Microsoft will enable it, however as of RTM Vista will not be supporting DVD Stream from the Extenders.
Matt Goyer posted the bit on Sony's
Standalone Changer for $799 and of course is now getting questions about
streaming those DVD’s to Extenders.
Matt, as much as he might want to, can’t talk about Microsoft’s future
products plans. There is nothing stopping
me however from providing some information on the policy of the issue.
Matt comments “…two
things could happen. We could enable DVD remoting from changers to Xbox’s, or
we could develop DVD Managed Copy where you ‘rip’ your DVDs to your hardware
and stream them to your Xbox. …We haven’t announced plans for either of those
scenarios.”
Honestly, both of the issues Matt covers need to
happen. There should be no “or” about
it. I want to cover the one that
everyone wants now, which is streaming DVD's from DVD Changers to
Extenders. No doubt a killer feature of Media Center
would be to have a single point of distribution to legally send out DVDs all over
your house.
I’ve said before that Vista
should support streaming of DVDs to Extenders. The reason for this is because WMRM-ND (eg
WMDRM-ND) was
approved streaming of current DVD’s with CSS. There is no reason why (come Vista) you shouldn’t be able to stream DVD’s from your
DVD Changer to your Xbox 360. I will be extremely
disappointed if Microsoft skips this important development. The good thing is that it should appear, as
WMRM-ND should already be supported on Extenders. All Microsoft has to be is develop the
middleware to take the DVD from 1394 (the DVD Changer), and wrap WMRM around it
and send that onto the wire. Some people
might remember that Niveus Media is
developing a solution
that would follow the same type of path.
HD
DVD's Managed Copy with Xbox 360 Extender shouldn’t be an issue at
all. I’m sure Matt works on this
everyday with since he currently owns
the Movies (My DVD's) feature in Media Center 2005. I'm not sure if we will see a "Managed Copy" like feature for current DVD's, although Doherty did say in the article above that Microsoft was "evaluating" ripping DVD's to their hard drive. In other words, if Microsoft can get WMRM approved then it might happen.
