Play DVD Movies On Macintosh Computers Without Optical Drives
Monday, January 4, 2010 at 9:45PM My daughter and I wanted to watch a DVD tonight. Each time we put the DVD into my Mac Mini, the Mini would spit the media back out. I'm still not sure what the cause of that was.
Next I tried ripping it on my MacBook Pro with HandBrake. It ripped into an m4v file but the sequence of the movie was all scrambled. This wouldn't work either.
I told my daughter the bad news. She looked at me and said matter of factly, "...just put the DVD in your MacBook and play it over on the Mac Mini." A brilliant idea if it were possible. I initially told her that it wasn't possible, but then I remembered Apple's Remote Disk Sharing feature that is normally used to install software on the MacBook Air and other computers that do not have optical disk drives.
I went into the Sharing section of my MacBook Pro's System Preferences and turned on "DVD or CD Sharing." I next went to the Mac Mini and waited. Nothing. Remote Disk is supposed to show up in the sidebar of the finder window. Nothing.
It turns out that this feature is not enabled on some Macs. After a bit of Googling, I found this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2009012605560521
Open terminal on the computer that needs to access the remote DVD drive and type:
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
And then:
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool trueI logged out of the account and then back into it again. Now I could see the remote disk (DVD) loaded on the MacBook Pro while looking at the finder sidebar of the Mac Mini. Great! I opened up DVD player on the Mac Mini, navigated to the remote DVD and received an error that the disk was "...copy protected blah blah blah."
Googling more I found a number of posts stating that this procedure could not be done due to the copy protection restrictions put in place by Apple. I was just about to give up hope when I thought of VLC (Video Lan Client). I opened up VLC, browsed to the remote DVD, and lo and behold, IT WORKED! We are now watching the DVD on the Mac Mini as it is being played on the MacBook Pro's DVD drive.
My daughter has mad skills!
CH
P.S. This got me thinking. Why doesn't Apple just allow this by default? I'm jumping through way too many hoops just to play a movie that WE LEGALLY OWN. *sigh*
Reader Comments (4)
That's a real bummer. At least you got it to work but that sounds like a kludge. Too bad there isn't a Mac solution like AnyDVD for PC. I wonder if it would be possible to port it or create an alternative.
Aaron,
There are actually many DVD ripping/copying solutions for Mac. In this situation, the only one that I tried was HandBrake. We were in a hurry to watch the DVD and this remote DVD playback worked out for us. If you are interested in Mac DVD duplication apps for the purposes of archival/backup check out:
MacTheRipper
Drive-in
Popcorn
Ripit
CH
I had a problem playing a DVD in my old lampshade iMac along these same lines just this past weekend. The drive has gone bad, so I was using an external USB dvd drive. This worked fine for White Christmas, but DVD Player.app refused to play Tinkerbell due to "Copy Protection". I just used VLC which played it fine.
Handbrake does a pretty good job ripping movies, I should try it on the Tinkerbell movie. :-)
No worky with Snow Leopard upgrade on the Mini. I had to use the physical media.