Sometimes the wife and I start watching a rented DVD in the family room.  But then it's getting late and I want to finish the movie upstairs in the bedroom.  Now normally, I'd have to go to the media center and eject the movie, take the DVD to the bedroom and load the DVD into the 2nd media center and then finish the movie.

Sometimes I forget to take the DVD out the next day and when it comes time to return the DVD, I start looking all over the family room for the DVD.  After a while, I remember the DVD is still in the bedroom media center.  So I go upstairs and get the movie.  I don't want to keep doing this.

I had enabled DVD Gallery on my 2 media centers.  That way the 2nd media center can access the ripped DVD's on the 1st media center.  Next I enabled sharing on my DVD drive.  I then went to my 2nd media center and added the DVD drive as a watched folder on the 2nd media center's DVD Gallery.

Now when I put a DVD in the 1st media center, the 2nd media center sees it too.  If I want to finish the movie in the bedroom, I just stop the DVD on the 1st media center, go upstairs to the 2nd media center, and go to the DVD Library.  I just select the DVD drive of the 1st media center and presto, I can finish the movie upstairs. 

It would be really cool if there's a way I can just pause the movie downstairs, go upstairs and then have the movie follow me upstairs so all I have to do is unpause the movie.

Now I always know where the rented DVD is located.  I had also disconnected the DVD on the 2nd media center. :-)

I've never tried playing the DVD on the 1st media center and then accessing the same DVD drive from the 2nd media center.  I don't know if that would work. 

Anyone else try this?

-Josef

You should be able to set up the DVD drive on the first Media Center to be shared, and then connect to it on the second Media Center - it's probably not going to be seamless, but would get you your DVD playing.   You will also probably need to get AnyDVD, as the protection on the disc would by default stop this scenario from working.

Cheers
Andrew

I actually tried this a little while ago. While the DVD would show up, it wouldn't actually play through VMC.

I could get it playing through VLC though, so not sure why it wouldn't work through the media centre interface.