The problem:
I find the slot-loading “Super”drives in most of Apple’s lineup way too noisy to comfortably watch movies; since Apple introduced the Macbook Air (and maybe before that, although I wasn’t aware of it) it has been possible to share a DVD drive over a network. I thought this would be a good way to use my PC DVD drive to watch DVD movies on my Mac, however, although one can enable drive sharing in the Sharing System Prefs, there appears to be no way to access another computer’s drive.
The solution:
After a bit of googling it appears to be a simple command line hack to get drive sharing to work on any Mac, not just the Air. Here’s how…
- Install drive sharing software on the PC. I downloaded this from the Apple support website. It’s labeled as “DVD or CD Sharing”. A quick search on the downloads page should bring you the required file.
- Once installed, go to your Windows Control panel and click the “CD/DVD Sharing” icon and activate the required checkbox.
- On the Mac, activate CD/DVD Sharing in the Sharing menu of System Prefs.
You’re almost ready to share those drives. Firewalls shouldn’t be a problem, but you may need to check them just in case.
Now for the clever bit; Apple have turned off the Remote Disc feature on Macs that aren’t Minis or Airs. To activate it on my machine I used a quick terminal hack:
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool TRUE
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool TRUE
Restart the machines and all should be well. If you ever want to turn this feature off, just uncheck the sharing option in Sys Prefs/Control Panel. To hide the “Remote Disc” in the finder, re-enter the above code but change the booleans to FALSE.
Update
When trying to play back DVDs in VLC I’ve been getting some errors along the lines of “Can’t access this disc”. If this is the case you’ll have to manually add the particular DVD in the Sharing menu/DVD sharing Advanced of System Prefs.