About
About
CDemu is a software suite designed to emulate an optical drive and disc (including CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs) on the Linux operating system.
CDEmu consists of:
- a kernel module implementing a virtual drive-controller
- libmirage which is a software library for interpreting optical disc images
- a daemon which emulates the functionality of an optical drive+disc
- textmode and GTK clients for controlling the emulator
Optical media emulated by CDemu can be mounted within Linux. Automounting is also allowed.
It is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 or later.
To learn more about each of the packages comprising the project, please visit their corresponding pages, listed under 'Packages' section on the menu.
History
CDemu was originally designed in 2003 by a group of friends (Robert Penz and Justus Schwartz) as a patch for MPlayer that allowed mounting .CUE/.BIN files. After the patch was completed, they realized the simplicity, and wrote a module for the kernel capable of emulating a CD-ROM from .CUE/.BIN files.
The webpage for the legacy project has been kept for sentimental reasons.
Originally, CDemu was named Virtual CD, but this name had been previously trademarked, and the owners of the trademark requested that they not use the name.
As of June 2007, development on CDemu 0.8 ceased and a rewrite was developed instead. Most of this work was done by Rok Mandeljc. The motivation for this was because the kernel module had become increasingly hard to maintain and keep in sync with the Linux kernel. This new version of CDEmu took another approach to the emulation by doing as much as possible in userspace. Version 1.0.0 was then released in December 2007.