CD/DVD Sharing on Mac OS X

In the Macintosh world, when you want to do something, it's supposed to "just work". Which is why I had trouble enabling CD/DVD sharing in the control panel until I found this hint at macosxhints.com. Simply enter the following terminal commands, and relaunch the Finder.

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

You should have access to shared CD/DVD resources on your network. The "Remote Disc" icon will show up in your sidebar. To reverse it, simply substitute "false" in the two lines. It worked for me until I got tired of transferring massive amounts of data over the LAN and just replaced the drive in my Mac Mini.

One quirky behavior is that the "Remote Disc" icon remains in your sidebar even if there are no shared devices available on the network.

By the way the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) changed from maxosxhints.com to hints.macworld.com in August 2010. They're currently redirecting the old URL with an http 301, but if you find any of my older links to their site are broken, this may be why.