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I have a bluray player that has a USB interface that allows me to plug external hard drives and pendrives for me to play movies or music files.

I was wondering if it's possible to have the PC or notebook or any other computer-like device using a USB-USB cable and make the bluray player detects this as an external drive.

Note: I'm using a bluray player as example but it can be the same for DVD players, TV or sound sytems.

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  • Interesting idea, but I don't think it'd be worth the time or the money as compared to shuttling a USB over sneakernet.
    – digitxp
    Commented Jan 3, 2011 at 4:05

3 Answers 3

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I don't know of any easy way to use a laptop/desktop as a mass storage device. One way to have the player read the drives is to use an inexpensive external USB drive reader, although you have to open the casing or remove the drives to plug them into the reader.

Personally I would just purchase an external drive. Also make sure the device can read NTFS filesystems before spending time on this.

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  • +1 Agreed, unless you're doing this purely for learning experience, you'll spend more in time than you would to just go buy a cheap drive. Plus, once you get it setup, it will most likely be something that you have to maintain as computers weren't intended for this purpose.
    – jmort253
    Commented Jan 3, 2011 at 4:29
  • Indeed buying an external drive would be faster and simple. I know that, but as I said on the other answer, I'd like to know if such kind of software, like an emulator, exists or not. Thank you
    – homemdelata
    Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 1:34
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Yes there is good sir, here it is exactly what you want:

https://hardwaresecrets.com/connecting-two-pcs-using-a-usb-usb-cable/

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  • What a cool device. It gets around the problem of making a PC look like a mass storage device.
    – quickly_now
    Commented Jan 3, 2011 at 5:33
  • Yeah, it's a cool device, but if I'm going for a hardware/external device, I'd rather to use an external HD :). I want to know if it's possible to do via software, with an emulator or something.
    – homemdelata
    Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 1:31
  • @homemdelata With Windows 10 and USB 3.1 type C this may now be possible, however, it would require finding a driver that exposes some portion of your disk as a USB Mass Storage device and I don't know if it would be backwards compatible if the host was using something less than USB 3.1. See msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/…
    – flungo
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 19:01
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No, this isn't possible without specialized hardware. USB networks are organized as a tree, with the host controller at the root, hubs as branches and the devices as the leaves.

Normal PCs or notebooks are not designed to act as USB devices. They only act as USB hosts. And you can not emulate it in software, because they don't even have the right connectors for that. You see, there are actually two kinds of USB plugs:

USB-A and USB-B

You have certainly seen the left one. This is an USB-A plug. This plug always goes towards the host of the USB tree. It can't go towards a device.

The right one is an USB-B plug. This one is the one you use when the connection points towards the devices of the USB tree. You might not see that one too often in the wild, because USB cables are usually fixed directly to devices or hubs. But there are USB devices where the cable can be removed, and in that case you usually have this connector (or a miniature version of it, like with cellphones).

If you wanted a PC or notebook to act as a USB device instead of a USB host, then it would need a port which fits an USB-B plug. Or alternatively, a USB-A plug coming out of the device (like on a thumb drive). And I don't think I ever saw that on a PC or notebook.

So how does the device linked in the answer by Guillermo Siliceo Trueba work? What this plastic box in the middle of the cable contains isn't actually one but two USB devices. One connects to the first host and the other to the second host. These two USB devices then communicate with each other internally through a protocol which isn't USB. Which is also why this devices requires a device driver to communicate. There is no direct USB connection between the two hosts. The USB protocol wasn't designed for point-to-point communication, so this feature needs to be emulated by a custom device driver. Which is required on both devices. So you probably won't be able to use it with your blu ray player.

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    As for the USB-USB cable: Usually the black box in the middle has a USB-network interface on each side with a dummy network between them. For both computers it looks like a USB network card with a point to point network connection to the other computer. Both computers need drivers for the USB network card and a network stack. The Blue-Ray player won't have that so it will not work.
    – Tonny
    Commented Apr 14, 2022 at 13:54

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