Share a CDROM or DVDROM drive from one Linux System to another.
 

How can I share the DVD/CD drive from my desktop machine to my server machine.

My media server system lives in another room. I usually play podcasts or ripped copies of CDs that are stored on it, or on a variety of shared hard drives. No problem there. But sometimes I want to play a CD directly from my desktop cdrom drive through the media server.

Why? Well, the media server is attached to my house wide sound system and therefore will play everywhere. Why not just rip the CD? Sometimes I want to play a cd that I don't own, perhaps from the library, or borrowed from a friend.

So I want to put the CD in my desktop drive, then fire off mplayer over on the media server having it pick up from the CD Rom on my desktop.

I would guess that I need to add the cdrom to my exported drives (how do I do this)? Then mount from the media server (should be able to just mount, right? And all should be wonderful!

Is the CD an Audio CD? If so, sorry, but I guess you can't share a raw device over the LAN. :(

That's what I was thinking too. Data disks can be mounted and shared, but since audio CD's are normally unmountable it's impossible to share them directly.

It looks like it should be possible to mount an audio cd with cdfs though, making the disk visible as a set of .wav files which should be sharable and playable over the network. There may be other similar options available as well.

Another option might be to see if you can find some way to play the disk on your local computer and pipe the output directly into the server's sound system.

Yeah, audio CD. I was kind of suspecting that might be the case. Dammit!

I probably just need to burn the discs on a temporary basis, and set up a cron job to delete after a month or something. Yeah, that is the thing to do.

Thanks,

I did not realize that audio cds could not be mounted! Thanks. I will look into cdfs though.

Piping the output would be just as effective, but I think that in a local situation the cd is connected directly to the sound card, bypassing the main bus. That would make it more difficult to redirect.

Audio CD's can't be mounted because they do not contain a filesystem as such. The CD standard was originally designed for playback on standalone players after all and IIUC is mostly just a data stream and an error-correction subsystem.


Computer CD drives nearly always give you the ability to access audio data either through the analog cable connected to the soundcard, or digitally through the main bus. It's usually up to the playback application as to which one is read. Most players I know of give you the ability to choose between them somewhere in their CD playback properties. But even if you can't get the digital data, you may be able to grab the output directly from the soundcard in some way.

I was always under the impression that the analog cable was there mostly for when you use the drive's built-in controls anyway, so that you don't have to rely on the OS for playback. But I could be wrong.