NetDVD removes the need for you to have an external DVD drive to plug into your netbook. Instead, you can use the one built into your standard desktop machine and stream the data across, treating the remote hardware as if it were part of the netbook.

The system works almost invisibly. We simply downloaded and ran the server program on the PC that had the DVD drive, and did the same with the client program on the netbook. The client automatically detected the server.

What makes NetDVD so useful is the way it appears to the system. It's seen as a physical disc drive, making it possible to use it for playing video DVDs, audio CDs and even games.

In fact, we don't have much bad to say about it; 64-bit operating systems aren't officially supported on the server side, but we found it worked fine on Windows 7 64-bit anyway.

On the client side, 64-bit isn't supported at all, but it seems churlish to complain about that given the target machines for this app.

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