[keisetsu]

Here's my problem: I have been running XBMC (and now Kodi) since Frodo on an old laptop with a broken DVD drive, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get Kodi to play from my USB drive. It seems like I was briefly able to right click on the disk in the file menu and run "Play disk" somewhere in Gotham antiquity, but it didn't work on the next update.

I've googled and otherwise searched for literally years now, and I've never seen a good answer for "how do I make Kodi default to /dev/sr1 instead of /dev/dvd (or whatever it defaults to now)?". More recent searches seem to indicate that /dev/dvd is no longer supported by udev, so that's not an answer either.

For now I have to close Kodi and run mplayer to watch a dvd. It works, but I sure would like to stay inside the Kodi world for all my entertainment needs.

If it is a setting in some configuration file, I would be so very grateful to whomever could point it out to me.

[wsnipex]

tried this?

Code:

sudo ln -s /dev/sr1  /dev/dvd

[keisetsu]

I have, but that doesn't do anything. I made the link then restarted Kodi. The name of the disk appears in the file list, but that happened before I did the link. Other programs that are looking for /dev/dvd work, but when I choose "Play Disc" it does nothing, and when I try just "Play", Kodi freezes. When I try "Load/eject", it ejects my old dvd drive! Is Kodi looking at /dev/sr0 now?

Ok, I got it. Kodi is looking for /dev/cdrom! When I relinked that it worked. I guess I can set that up on boot, but is there any way I could get a configuration option? I might even be able to submit a patch if you could point me in the direction of where these things are decided.

[wsnipex]

we use libcdio and libdvd(css) for that.
related code is in xbmc/storage/DetectDVDType.cpp xbmc/lib/libdvd

[keisetsu]

Looking at cdioSupport.cpp helped me discover an easier solution: just setting XBMC_DVD_DEVICE to /dev/sr1 seems to work.

That might not work for someone if the /dev/cdrom device has a working dvd in it because cdioSupport seems to check if the default device is defined before even trying the environment variable, but I'm not sure.