Hey sailor, welcome to Toolbox. This is the place where Motherboard'll be telling you every week about this or that bit of software that you really need to have on your computer or phone-computer now. Requirements for something to be in our toolbox: 1) It is actually useful, like in the sense that you might turn to it on a regular basis and for hopefully more than one task, 2) It is free, or really, really exceptionally cheap (or cheap relative to function, like a smuggled tethering app), and 3) it is useful to most people, relatively speaking. Please send your suggestions to michaelb@motherboard.tv.
Imagine if your computer had like four extra DVD/CD/Blu-ray drives and they could all play copy-protected games, music, movies, and whatever. Now imagine you had those four and they took up no space because they’re not actually hardware and lived virtually in your machine. Don’t worry that there’s no slot to put a disc in, ‘cause we’re not playing actual physical (paid-for) discs with Daemon Tools’ drive emulator.Instead, we’re using ISOs (.iso files), which are “disc images” that act like normal discs, but live only as data—and travel across the internet as such in bittorrent form. Now, say you grab an ISO of Speed 2 (DVD version, with all of the awesome bonus features) from the great wild west of torrent tracking; now, you’re able to simply slip that ISO into your fake DVD drive and, bravo, you are watching Speed 2 (with commentary!).It gets better. Say you wind up with a copy-protected disc of something or other, like a real-life shiny Blu-ray of the above mentioned feature film from a rental store or your mate’s shelf. The software also has the capability of making an disk image/ISO out of it, and you can get rid of the disc and, once again, not have to worry about any copy-protection, as you’re playing it through the fake drive. Which looks just like a real drive on your computer. (There’s other ways to get movies online, of course, but with disc images, you’re getting the whole DVD with menus and commentaries etc.)So, you can also consider this to be just a good archive system, a way to back up your DVDs or CDs of big booty porn .jpgs—which become unsearchable in binary-reduced ISO format—or even pieces of software.You can think of plenty of more ways this can come in handy. Like, imagine having the entire Adobe Creative Suite on a thumb drive as ISOs with a copy of Daemon Tools. It’s a fairly effortless way to get that software to a new computer without hassles.Download here.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
