Playing DVD movies are a bit harder if they are encrypted. You need to put write permissions on that drive. If you have DVD decryptor program. You can copy the whole DVD or only the movie to a hard drive. 100 Mb ethernet easily handles DVD although 10 Mb can handle it too. You may get jurky motion during intense animation while using 10 Mb ethernet.
A router with a switch is the same as connecting a hub or a switch to a router. In a linksys router for example, the router part uses a Realtek 10Mb ethernet chip. The switch portion uses a five 10/100 ethernet chip. The switch is a hub but with an interesting feauture. If someone is downloading a file from the internet and two users are playing a game against each other. The user that is downloading the file will not affect the users that are playing a game. The same goes for the two users play the game. This is all done by the virtual connection of the switch.
Yes, I did opened up a Linksys router. There are two boards in the bluish purple box. One is the switch part and the other board is the router. If the router doesn't work. You can disconnect the router and use the switch with out any problems. The switch can handle up to 5 devices but the router uses the fifth connection.
I did the test last week. On my Windows computer the DVD movie portion was decrypted and placed on a hard drive. Using the LINUX computer, I used XINE. I mounted the Windows computer using SAMBA mounting utility and watch the movie. No hiccups using 100 Mb ethernet although there was pauses when it load each vob file. This was expect because it did pause on my Windows system when I loaded the vob file locally.
BTW, why use SSH. You don't need a secured telnet if you are behind a firewall. If you are accessing your computer across the world, yes you need it.