VideoLAN client ignores region code and streams DVDs

April 2, 2004

I wish I could get TechTV on cable in my area. Maybe I will soon, I think that Comcast is buying it. The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-plaform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux. On the TechTV shows "Call for Help" section, they show how to stream a DVD. The website has a video for those with enough bandwidth or patience for such content.

Major selling points

Portable
What do I mean by portable? I mean you can get it for every conceivable Unix-like OS (Linux, BeOS, BSD, and Mac OS X) as well as Windows.
A note about DVD playback
VLC doesn't enforce region codes, meaning you can play out-of-region DVDs with no problem. My Region 2 and Region 4 DVDs worked just fine on my home computer. Of course it gets better.
Streaming!
The real kicker: VLC doesn't just play back media files. Oh no, my friend, it can also stream them. That's right, you can now stream every media file, including DVDs, over a network. The only thing you need to worry about is network bandwidth, especially with DVDs. I smell a killer app for Gigabit Ethernet.

If you like, you may also visit the VideoLAN site which of course, has documentation for this software. There, you can also find a VideoLAN WIKI page that strives to answer common problems by users. Its goal is to document what is not in the official documentation such as tips for each O.S, the graphical interfaces etc. A WIKI is a page that can be changed by a user and is constantly changing and updated.

Source: TechTV