ihaul Posted August 13, 2009 Share Posted August 13, 2009 I posted this on another forum and got no responses. Perhaps it is too specialized to interest most people or maybe it is not possible. I have a dual boot (XP and OS X) Asus 1005HA that is working very well except for the annoying inability to use DVD player to view the ripped movies I keep on my SD card. I know there are other programs but I really like DVD player. DVD player won't start up without a DVD player attached. The default requirement is a built-in DVD player and I did manage to change the DVDplayback file to allow an external USB player. I really would like to run DVD player without any drive attached but I'm beginning to believe that is not possible. If you try to start up without a drive, you get an error message. Failing that, I am wondering if it is possible to set up a USB stick that emulates a DVD drive. Everything I have been able to find (after hours of searching) focuses on making USB sticks bootable with the intention of installing something from them - not appearing as DVD drives to the system. What I want is to fool OS X into thinking that there is a DVD drive installed in the USB slot so I can start DVD player up. It is a lot easier to carry around an extra thumb drive than a DVD player. It doesn't have to do anything else - just sit there until OS X scans the bus and says, (figuratively) "Oh, I see there is a USB DVD player plugged in so I guess I'll let this bozo start up DVD player." I don't know enough about this to know if it is a simple thing or not. But, if it is possible and you know how, would you please share that information? Thank you. ihaul Asus eee Pc 1005HA XP professional & OSX 10.5.7 iDeneb install Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihaul Posted August 15, 2009 Author Share Posted August 15, 2009 I found a resolution to this problem. In case anyone else wishes to do this, here is what I did... First, I replaced the modified DVDplayback file with the original, unmodified file that looks for an internal DVD drive. If you never modified yours, you can skip this step. Open Toast Titanium (I have version 7.1.3 so the newer versions may differ) Click on 'Data' tab Select 'DVD-ROM (UDF)' under the 'Formats' pane Click 'New Disc' at the bottom of the Data window Name it whatever you want Under the 'File' menu, choose 'Save as Disc Image...' Navigate to desktop and click 'Save' A few seconds later you have a disk image on your desktop Quit Toast Any time you want to use DVD player, double click the disk image before you open DVD player. Toast will automatically open with your image in the Image File window. Click on 'Mount Image' and close Toast. You will have a nice, shiny, new DVD disk showing on your desktop. You can now open DVD Player and it will detect the mounted DVD image as being in an internal DVD drive and will run. I suppose you could also write a script to mount it automatically but doing it manually only takes seconds. ihaul Asus eee Pc 1005HA XP professional & OSX 10.5.7 iDeneb install Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bisk Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Doesn't work on Snow Leopard 10.6.8. Cool idea though ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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