Change optical drive manufacturer, model, etc

[inetknght]

In a Windows host and Windows guest; I want to install the Blu-Ray player software that came with my BD-ROM drive. I don't want to install it on my host OS since it is rather bloaty. So it seemed to me that a guest OS is perfect for it. However, because VirtualBox's optical drive emulation sets the manufacturer to be VirtualBox instead of my host drive's values, the software refuses to install. Is there a way to change the device's name instead of just "VBOX CD-ROM ATA Device" and etc?

[BillG]

No. The vm does not see the physical hardware of the host. It sees its own emulated device. VirtualBox passes the data from the physical device through to the vm. So the device driver for your physical device must be installed in the host OS.

[mpack]

No guarantees, but if you can try enabling the "Passthrough" option in the VM storage settings (look to the right while the CD/DVD drive entry is highlighted). If that doesn't work then nothing will.

Incidentally, if this is Blu-Ray video player software we are talking about, then IMHO the chances of that running happily in a VM are essentially nil, even if you manage to get the drivers installed. But please go right ahead and prove me wrong!

[inetknght]

I tried passthrough mode. Unfortunately, it didn't work for what I want.

Note that I don't believe I need to have the guest get drive information from the physical drive; all I believe I need to be able to do is change the existing data that VirtualBox provides. So instead of always providing "VBOX CD-ROM", I could change it to "VBOX DVD-ROM" or "VBOX BD-ROM" or even just a bunch of letters... similar to how certain other drive emulation software allows you to do that.

If it's not possible via vboxmanage or etc, any idea if it might be possible to accomplish what I want with the VirtualBox API, perhaps by creating a plugin which creates a new device type which VirtualBox could add to storage controllers?

[mpack]

Then I suggest you read section 9.8.2 of the user manual, but you'll need to puzzle it out yourself (if its possible at all) because I doubt many others have needed to do it.

[inetknght]

Nope, I tried everything I could with the advanced vboxmanage setextradata commands; doesn't seem to work to get W7 guest to see the device as anything other than "VBOX CD-ROM ATA Device"

If I can't find a workable idea in the API, I wonder how difficult it might be to work on adding that kind of functionality to VirtualBox itself?