I really like FUSE, the filesystem in userspace that facilitated the creation of gcfuse. I think the killer app for FUSE is sshfs. It’s a minor miracle that if you have an SSH server running on a machine you can use sshfs to mount a filesystem from another machine. Authentication, encryption, all taken care of. None of that NFS or Samba configuration hassle.

I started wondering what else I might be able to use FUSE for. There is the small issue of Sega Dreamcast disc images. These games contain a lot of multimedia encoded with Sofdec’s middleware tools. For the most part, these discs use an ISO-9660-like filesystem that’s just a little different and doesn’t operate with Linux’s ISO-9660 module. Perhaps a FUSE/ISO-9660 module that can also handle the modified Dreamcast variant? Actually, I see that the big FUSE app directory lists an app appropriately named fuseiso which can load an ISO-9660 filesystem. It might be worth a look.

Thinking bigger, what about a FUSE module that mounts a DVD and presents it in some interesting manner? For starters, it will transparently decrypt the data. Then, present the contents of the DVD as a series of chapters or tracks or menu options. Since a DVD is not necessarily a strict hierarchy, perhaps organize the different viewing options in different directories. Or a /proc-like special filesystem that allows tinkering with the audio and subtitle options. It’s late and I’m just tossing out ideas here. Feel free to jump in.

Exploiting capabilities/limitations of available video hardware is nothing new in terms of multimedia programming. The old IBM VGA hardware had a 320×200 resolution mode that could display 256 unique colors. For years, that drove many graphic-heavy applications (notably games but also certain video applications such as FLIC files originally generated by Autodesk software). Back when I was hacking on the Sega Dreamcast I started to brainstorm about a vector quantizer video codec that could take advantage of the PowerVR 3D graphics hardware present in the console.

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