Project Zebra: Just a rabid goat, foaming at the mouth ►
◄ Project Zebra: Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell
Towards the end of 2025 I got a Hitachi-LG GP96 DVD drive that can be run directly off a tablet, but I couldn't let go of wanting to be able to play stuff without setting up additional hardware and with being able to just pick up one device. Can DVD playback on Android leverage the reliability of power line adapters and a reasonable quality network switch, newer router and newer tablets? It seems like it. Ensuring a stable network is crucial to being able to play stuff without issues, and that was an issue when I tried with previous configurations. I'm still not using recent hardware, but the PC having what's effectively a wired connection is I think the key difference.
Method #1 - copy the disc to an ISO file
No need to re-encode with things like Handrbake. Just do "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=copied.iso" then then open the iso in VLC. Alternatively, for added efficiency or if you prefer a GUI application and still very quick, the ancient DVD Shrink for Windows can reduce DVDs of cartoons etc to around a couple of gigabytes each, and it works fine under Wine on Linux so I prefer this to rip watching copies. Apparently DVD Shrink can still be made to work on Windows or there's likely plenty of other more modern options, even if optical media has mostly given way to streaming services.Incidentally, I had to install the wine32 package to get my old bottles to work, per this discussion.
Method #2 - share the DVD drive over Samba
Kodi can play menus via a VIDEO_TS.IFO if you use its built in SMB browsing, i.e. not trying to open the files via another file manager such as Mixplorer, and if you share the mounted contents of the drive. Use the "lsblk" command to find your optical drive, then "sudo mount /dev/sr0 dvdfolder" to mount it to a folder. To quieten an external DVD drive by reducing its speed temporarily, you can use the "eject" command (0 = default speed) e.g. "eject -x 4 /dev/sr0".
Note when setting up SMB in Kodi, it seems that you need to not set the follow on options, i.e. not exclude the selected folder from scans, otherwise the menu shows but nothing can be selected. Presumably it needs that to be able to locate the VOBs, which isn't conveyed intuitively when you're looking at a DVD menu that seems to only partly work but makes sense with the file structure of discs.
I'm doing this on Debian, but Windows should be able to do similar sharing very easily.
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