Mac Mini Slow playing DVD from Network

Hi,
I was just wondering is anyone else has experienced slow dvd play with their mac mini's.
Playing from the SuperDrive (dvd player) or Firewire DVD player is NOT a problem. however I have a couple of backed up DVD on a LACIE network drive using CIFS or AFP(Gigabit although my mini is 100FD) and on a Linux server (NFS mount)and the DVD's will not play smoothly.
They are very choppy and unwatchable. I have also tried using VLC but that is even worse.
I 1gb Ram in my mini, I also had this problem under os X 10.4 as well as 10.5. I know that apple say that an intel processor 1.6 is needed for interlacing, but just playing should be fine.
My Suse Linux IBM T42 which is old has no problems playing the movies, but I want to play them on a 23inch Monitor. (the problem also occurs on my 19inch Monitor)
CPU wise. it never gets to 100% but when it goes over 70% the problem seems to occur.
I have tried to shut down all possible applications and disabled spotlight. this improved the playing experience a little.
Any thoughts on this would be great.
Thanks
Pete

HI,
The local disk is about 40% full, I upgraded it to a 160GB drive. (plus leopard was therefore a complete fresh install on a new drive)
If I play the files from the local drive then there is no problem. I also noticed that if I use a local USB to play the movies then this works. But when you only have 2 x usb ports on a mac mini, and the fact I don't want my mini to have control over the disks (so the mini can be turned off etc) as my house mate also has a mac and would like to stream music and I like to have access from my Linux Laptop.
I also noticed that the Mac Mini was very slow at accessing my NFS mount.
I have also done the normal network tests such as forcing Full Duplex 100mb or allowing Auto etc. (also my house mate has the same problem using Mac book pro with a wireless connection) The switch is not busy at all, and until two days ago the only two devices turned on were the Mac mini and the lacie drive
It is very frustrating, I want to upgrade to an iMac next month, but would have like to keep the mini as a media player. I like front row and dvd player they rock as applications. (except for the current issues I am having)
My switch is definitely up to the task. I got a netgear. When my laptop and server (old P4 PC running Linux) are plugged in they are fine with streaming and copying files.
I do notice that the Samba protocol on apple seems quite an 'expensive' over head with resources, but it still seems to work better than AFP. (from my Lacie drive)
I have a suspicion that the problem is a mixture of DVDplayer that was not designed to play dvd's from the network and maybe the protocol stack on OS X? I guess the next stage is to sniff the network and see if packets are getting dropped.
Thanks for any pointers so far.
Pete

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