Suggestion: Remote DVD/CD Drive Mapping

[mantle]

Hi there,

i lately was looking for a way to make my dvd accessible from another
computer. however, the only way seemed to be to use windows file sharing.
but this sharing is just a logical file view onto the dvd's contents, not a 1:1
mapping of the drive and its physical properties. it would be cool to have
a way to emulate the dvd on the computer and to delegate all i/o requests
to the host machine's drive.

up to now, the only way to achieve this is to make an image from a source media and mount that image on the remote machine, which is acceptable for cds but not for 4gb dvd datablobs.

yours,
mantle

[Andareed]

Just mount a mapped image.

[mantle]

well thats bad cause the image has to generated first
and swallows gigabytes of harddisc space for every medium
to mount. delegation should be easy to implement, and surely
would be a very useful feature.

vmware has such capabilities, however cant connect to remote drives.

[axiomdadak]

Hi,

I agree. As long as this isn't difficult to implement, it would be great. I've got two computers, which are networked, both with DVD-ROM drives, however, one of the drives is an older one that can't read DVD+R discs, so to be able to mount a directory or a mapped network drive would allow us to watch these DVD.

Always having to create an image takes way too long. It ruins the spontinatity of "let's watch this one... after I image 4 gigs."

Thanks
Axiom

[Copytrooper]

What's the problem? Just make network drive in windows (i.e. assign drive letter)
and use e.g. WinDVDs DVD from folder option.

[,jACkdA\W]

most copy protections will have problems checking via network drive
and for low-level checks... i don't think this can be done
except if you could achieve complete remote control on the network-drive machines OS ... and i sincerely doubt that on low-level issues :?

and for not copy-protection related stuff... what's the point??

[Andareed]

File access over a network is 100% transparent afaik. If you have a slow network, it would be like having a slow cdrom.

[iceman]

I use that all the time

I make a network drive and Map Network Drive

never failed yet and thats on everything since
windows 98se


have a nice day

[pstone]

I use that all the time
I make a network drive and Map Network Drive
never failed yet and thats on everything since
windows 98se
have a nice day

Unfortunately, this does not apply to low-level access so if you want to play BF2142 on computer A and it's networked to computer B and the DVD is in computer B, no networked drive, via windows or iSCSI or whatever will work.

This is an issue that I am actually trying to remedy... somehow XD

[Top Qat]

i lately was looking for a way to make my dvd accessible from another
computer

That's what iSCSI is for.

You can use the StarWind iSCSI target to share the DVD drive over to the other computer.
You need an iSCSI client such as StarPort or Microsoft iSCSI client to access the shared device.
The DVD drive behaves like a local drive on the remote computer
Look here http://www.rocketdivision.com/