[mythtv-users] remote dvd drive (was: remove dvd drive)

[Graham Wood]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 11:55:58AM -0400, Dylan R. Semler wrote:
> Did you mount the mount point (i.e. /media/cdrom for FC) or the device 
> (/dev/dvd)?
The mount has to be of the directory, NFS isn't intelligent enough to share a block device.

> If I unmount the dvd from /media/cdrom, then I can nfs mount that 
> directory.  If I then mount the dvd back to /media/cdrom, none of the 
> file structure of the dvd shows up remotely (but it does locally).
Have a look at "/etc/exports" - you need to specify any mounted filesystems to allow them to 
be exported.  For example, if you have "/usr" on a different partition to "/", then you 
would need a separate entry in /etc/exports.  This is a fundamental feature of the way that 
NFS works.  In your case you probably want a line similar to:

"/media/cdrom	*(ro,no_root_squash,async)" 

Which will allow everyone to access it read only.  However, I /believe/ that you'll need to 
restart the nfsd after mounting the CD/DVD - so it's not going to be seemless (unless you 
can setup a job to automatically do that on insert/eject?).

> As for ripping ISOs and mounting those, I do have several on my computer 
> and they seem to fill up hard disk space quickly.  Also, it's not 
> practical to wait to rip them before you can watch them, especially with 
> rented movies.
I think you're going to have a problem with trying to watch DVDs over NFS... I wouldn't have 
thought the decoding stuff would work - IIRC it accesses the block device directly.  If not 
then the above changes to export & restarting the nfs service should do it.

If that doesn't work then it should be possible to setup an auto-rip job that creates the 
ISO and then deletes it when you eject the DVD - the downside to this is that you've got a 
10 minute wait or so while it rips on insertion.

A neater solution would be to use the network block device.  This would should allow you to
make the DVD transparently visible on the other machine, with much less effort on the front 
end - but more setup would be required on the back end.

I should be able to write a wrapper script that you could use as your DVD playback software 
that did the config when you start/stop playback....  But don't have enough of a setup at 
the moment to test it I'm afraid.  If you want to go down this route, just tell me and I'll 
hack something together.

Graham