Making life easier with aliases

2026-05-12

Making muh DVD player work

I have a external USB DVD ripper drive I use to play DVDs when I need to. My wife and I were laying in bed trying to watch something and I needed to work with ChatGPT to get this drive reading the disk properly. This resulted in what was given to me in two sets of commands:

mkdir -p ~/dvd

AND

sudo mount /dev/sr0 ~/dvd && vlc dvd:///dev/sr0

Which I then combined into one alias so I didn’t have to run this every time I wanted to get the DVD player going:

alias dvdrun='mkdir -p ~/dvd && sudo mount /dev/sr0 ~/dvd && vlc dvd:///dev/sr0'

I also have another alias to stop the player and eject the disk… Which looks like magic to my wife, but it’s really not that complicated. ha.

It’s fun to create solutions and actually use all of this for things I do on a regular basis.