Sharing a CD/DVD drive over the network with OS X

Problem

I’ve got a Mac Mini with a broken DVD drive, but I wanted to install iWork on it from the installation DVD. 

Solution

I used the Remote Disc feature of Leopard that Apple developed for the diskless MacBook Air to share another machine’s drive over the network.

Instructions

On the client machine were you would like to use the CD / DVD, you need run 2 commands on the terminal.

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Then restart your computer.

Next on the server machine where you will be inserting the physical disk, you must enable CD / DVD sharing in System Preferences > Sharing.

CD & DVD Sharing with Remote Disc

Once you’ve done that, insert your CD or DVD and then you should be able to connect to it via finder on the client machine.

9 thoughts on “Sharing a CD/DVD drive over the network with OS X”

  1. You actually don’t need to restart your computer after applying the command line changes.

    Simply run this command:

    killall -HUP finder

    It will restart the finder app and the shared DVD/CD should appear.

  2. The instrucutions work fine.

    However, you can only use this to watch a DVD if the client (with the DVD player) and the remove server (with the DVD drive) and the DVD all use the same regional encoding.

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