Typically technologies are enablers. DVD is far from being the newest technology, but it makes easy and quality yet at home movies watch experiences possible. DVDs are affordable, if you don't travel.
There are other "technologies", that are rather blockers. They are there to make something not working for paid users, in hopes that (abiding) users pay double or multiple. Among the most evils, is this DVD region + css thing. Someone decided that DVD buyer only can see a DVD in 1 geographic region by paying once. If you want to see your favorite movie in Japan while you already purchased a DVD in U.S., you still have to pay for another copy in Japan. If you travel globally, you better not want to watch different movies, otherwise you have to pay for the same thing 7 times. And whats worse, you better not buy DVDs outside your region, because your home DVD player is not supposed to be able to play them, after 5 times region switches. Or you must pay a hefty fee to the player manufacturer to get you addition 5 region switches. All but you are the winners. Good deal!
Losers, forced ones, don't get to be good citizens, not voluntarily.
My new toy, that 24" iMac, lovely as it is, has a Matsushita UJ-875 DVD rom in it. Most late DVD ROMs have region control in firmware. In this case using a region relaxed player ain't cutting it. For many of such RPC2 ROMs,
http://forum.rpc1.org is a good place to look for upgrade firmware. Nothing else on earth deserves the word UPGRADE more. I am unlucky. Searching with my Matsushita version DB09 gets me no goody.
I do have another box, a Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It is headless (no monitor connected to it). So viewing needs to be on iMac. Playing directly on Ubuntu via ssh and pipe the raw frames to iMac is not an option. It takes too much bandwidth than my LAN can handle, 480x720x30(fps)x8x4(32 bit) = ~320 Mbps. I think my router is the bottle neck, but I am not sure. Wikipedia tells me full duplex ethernet gets only 200 Mbps. This would not be enough either.
Sharing Ubuntu DVD ROM seems a natural solution. But I was unable to find how to share DVD via nfs. I would certainly guess it is possible, why would it not be? Sharing via samba made it work, however. Two plain tricks. One is I had to install libdvdnav, libdvdread, and libdvdcss on Ubuntu. I found this surprising. So the shared DVD ROM is not receive IO commands and then reading the binary out to the remote machine, but receives DVD commands. Second, the original movie player on iMac does not work with this approach. No idea why not. But at least VLC works. So I am happy.
While googling, I found a software called k9copy. It is said to work like DVD Shrink on windows. Just downloaded and made a build. Will mess with it one day, when my son orders me to make a copy for him. It won't be long.
