Arnt Gulbrandsen
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Virtualbox, AnyDVD and read errors

If AnyDVD pops up a big warning dialog about read errors (suggesting a region-free fimware from rpc1.com, cleaning the DVD, etc), and you're using it inside Virtualbox, then the correct solution is:

Stop the virtual machine. The Settings icon will become available. Click it and select Storage. Select the DVD drive, and a checkbox named Passthrough will appear. Enable that and close the dialog. When you restart the guest Windows, AnyDVD will be able to read discs it previously refused to touch. I've a region-2 drive and can now read the region-4 films I purchased from 2001Video in Brazil. It seems AnyDVD is suddenly a great deal faster, too.

The other effect of this change is that Windows now has full rights to your DVD drive.

Popcorn Hour A-110

The Popcorn Hour A-110 is a small silent box that can play ISOs and other movies scaled up to 1920×1080 resolution. We have one, diskless, connected to our NAS via gigabit ethernet, […More…]

DVDs the Popcorn Hour A-110 can't play

I own and like a Popcorn Hour A-110, but I don't agree with all the web pages that say it plays everything.

Below is list of things I've tried to play that cause the player to freeze. In each case I ripped the DVDs using k9copy (a straight copy, no recompression or size/quality reduction). When I try to play the resulting ISO files the player freezes, does not react to the remote control, and has to be power-cycled. […More…]