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Comment by jzombie | Hacker News Reader

Have you contemplated ripping the DVDs and/or using a streaming service?

I wouldn't limit my options to just having a DVD if that means compromising everything else, especially if the computer is for work.

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I've considered ripping which is fine for my own discs, but I'm not going to do that every time we go to Redbox or the public library. (Yes I'm aware Redbox also does streaming, but last I checked some things were only on DVD and they were cheaper anyway.)

We use a streaming service but things seem to be spread out across five or more of them. (And as soon as I find something I like on there, it goes away!)

I agree with the issue of compromising everything else, which is why we've stuck with a 12-year-old computer. Obviously we'd have to settle a little, I was just wondering if anyone had ideas to avoid having to change our workflow too much.

Depending on your setup, you might could stream the DVDs over your network. Surely you could somehow share the drive.

I appreciate the suggestion. I tried that a few years ago, but Mac OS' built-in DVD sharing only works on discs without copy protection. Then I spent a few nights trying to get VLC to stream a disc from my PC but couldn't get that working either.

If anybody's got experience along this line of thought I'm interested; it could be a viable way forward as I have several desktops (Win/Lin/Mac) with optical drives.

My guess is that sharing from Linux would give you more options in terms of how to work around the copy protection.

I don't know if you use Docker, but a seriously weird sharing workaround could be to use a Samba share to mount in Finder, pointed to your drive on Linux... I made a Docker repo that could probably be modified to fit this use case: https://github.com/jzombie/sshfs-mac-docker

Another solution, that would most definitely work, would be using something like NoMachine or Parsec to just stream the desktop to your other computer. Parsec would probably give you really good quality as well.

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