I've gotten completely away from burning to platter. I prefer to rip to ISO and play the ISO image straight off the HD using software emulating a dvd drive. Elby's Virtual Clonedrive has been PERFECT on Windows Vista HP. I thought: Man, I'd like to be able to do this on Linux. I started looking around and I ran across CDEMU. To cut to the chase: A little rough to install but it has been working perfectly. CDEMU is very picky about its envuronment. I grub a number of distros and I've got a distro set up JUST to run CDEMU, which it does flawlessly. If there's any interest, I can run down a set of instructions for installing and using this CD/DVD EMULATOR in a tailored environment that are better instructions than any you'll find elsewhere. \m
Errrr... what is the point?? Just mount the image and it behaves like a drive. You can even mount it to a place where your OS expects to see a dvd or cd like for example /media/cdrom2 (you can even set this up permanently as a location in your /etc/fstab file) I don't understand why anybody would want to make an application which does something which you can do easily anyway, unless it is for testing say xisos in a development environment.. Certainly no use to the average linux user.
If you're just watching a DVD off your hard drive, VLC and mplayer don't even need to mount them dude. Otherwise just do as varnull suggests and use loopback and save having to download and install junk.
At last I found a use for it. You can use it to test the authoring of copy protected cd's which are protected with media checks to prevent normal mounting of the iso without actually burning one. Who ever needs to do that seeing as the protection license costs more than 10,000 blank disks?
