Description:

Alcohol 120% and Alcohol 52% are software products that provide the capability to create a virtual CD/DVD drive device and mount disc images to that device. This simulates the act of inserting a physical disc into a drive, only the end result is faster and quieter. Alcohol 52% is the entry level product which does not provide CD/DVD burner support, while 120% is the full-blown version of the software. For media server/HTPC purposes, Alcohol 52% is adequate.

Typically, "ISO" images are created using a DVD ripping utility and stored on a disk. The single file represents a fully intact copy of the contents of the DVD.

When this driver is used in combination with the media repository in CQC, it becomes possible to  "insert" a "disc" into the virtual drive when a title is selected using the cover art browser. If the media player is configured to auto-detect disc insertion, the disc can begin playing automatically. A further trick involves the bookmarking feature in Zoom Player. Bookmarks for the start of the disc can be saved, such that when the disc starts playing, the correct audio and subtitle tracks are chosen and the disc will begin playback at the chosen point, bypassing menus and legal warnings. This can make a CQC-based system behave closely to some commercial offerings in the media management space..

This driver was contributed by Stephen Richardson (prefect@tangentaudio.com)

Quirks and Limitations:

This driver is written as an application control driver, and thus will require an application control server running on the machine where the driver is to be run.

It is a fairly simple-minded driver, and simply wraps calls to the AxCmd.exe command line front-end for Alcohol. It does not provide any feedback about which disc image is currently mounted (if any), or error feedback.

It is highly recommended that you use Microsoft's TweakUI tool to turn off auto-play for your virtual drives. This will stop PCFriendly and other such players included as part of the DVD image from popping up each time you mount a new image. Fortunately, disabling the auto-play mechanism does not stop applications from receiving notification of a disc being inserted, so you can set up applications to automatically start playing the movie when the disc is "inserted."

If an image is already mounted on a virtual drive, it will first be un-mounted ("ejected"), and then the new disc image will be mounted ("inserted"). This can sometimes cause errors if the disc was playing in Zoom Player, for example, so it might be best to send a "stop" transport command to the media player before mounting or un-mounting..

Connection Details

This device has no connection to a device.

Driver Restrictions

THIS DRIVER IS PROVIDED FREE OF CHARGE, BUT THE AUTHOR MAY NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ERRORS OR OMISSIONS. NO WARRANTY IS PROVIDED EXPRESSLY OR IMPLICITLY. THE DRIVER MAY BE MODIFIED FOR ANY PURPOSE, BUT THE AUTHOR MUST BE CREDITED IN THE SOURCE AND  ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION.

Driver Fields

This section lists the fields that the driver makes available, their types, minimum and maximum values, etc...

Name	Type	R/W	Description/Limits
VirtualDrive	String	R/W	Instructs the driver to use a particular virtual drive in Alcohol. This is a number from 1-4. In most cases, this will be left alone, but it is provided to allow advanced scenarios when multiple virtual drives might be used at once.
MountImage	String	W	Writing a fully qualified path to an image file to this field will cause CQC to mount that image on the virtual drive specified by VirtualDrive. To an application (and to Windows if auto-play is enabled), this will look just like a real disc was inserted.
UnmountImage	Boolean	W	Writing any value to this field will cause the currently mounted image to be unmounted. To an application, this looks like the disc has been ejected.