A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a beta test request from Blue Lion Software. They posted on an eePC forum that they were working on a product to enable the use of a DVD drive remotely for netbooks.
Because the things I do with my own software, I considered myself to be a very good betatester for a product like this, so I signed up for it. The tool works pretty good for what it is designed to do, but of course I did a few things it was not designed for. The main idea of the application is to watch DVDs on a netbook by using a DVD drive on a different computer on the network. While sharing a DVD drive works in some cases, this only works with unprotected DVDs, and on the client machine, the mapping would appear as a network drive, and not as a DVD drive. With NetDVD, the client actually sees the drive as a DVD drive, and also redirects the protection.
Of course I tried DVD Catalyst on it the moment I installed it. It was the very first thing I did, just to see what would happen. Well, this works just fine. The processor speed of the eeePC I have is quite limited, but using NetDVD, performance was the same as when used with a USB DVD drive.
In addition, I decided to see if it would work with fake drives. I mapped a DVD iso with daemontools on the server machine, and then selected the fake dvd drive in the NetDVD server application, and accessed it on the netbook without any issues.
Thirdly, I decided to see what would happen with an install cd. That works fine as well.
While still in beta, I believe NetDVD will become a pretty useful tool for netbook users, but also for people who have media servers and such.
The website is not up yet, but keep a look out for it on http://www.bluelionsoftware.co.uk/
