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[dhampny]

I'm using MC 26 for Mac.  MC recognizes my external Apple SuperDrive when I insert a CD.  It shows up in Drives & Devices and I can play the disc.  However, when I insert a movie DVD there is no recognition by MC.  No action is taken by MC and it doesn't appear in Drives & Devices.  Has anyone else had this problem and come up with a solution?

I've also posted about this problem in the MC 26 for Windows forum because some people there have been helping me with a movie cataloging issue that I'm having and this may be related.  But I thought I should post about this external drive problem here since I'm running a Mac and I'm hoping someone here has found a solution.

David

[blgentry]

MC for Mac does not support optical discs except CDs.  MC will not recognize, play , or rip any DVD.

If you want to play DVD based movies with MC, you must first rip them to a compatible unencrypted format.  I suggest MakeMKV.  It's (mostly) free and makes unencrypted MKVs of DVDs and BluRays.  I have used it hundreds of times and it works well.

If you really want to insert a DVD (or BluRay) and play it directly, MC is not the right tool.

Brian.

[dhampny]

MC for Mac does not support optical discs except CDs.  MC will not recognize, play , or rip any DVD.

If you want to play DVD based movies with MC, you must first rip them to a compatible unencrypted format.  I suggest MakeMKV.  It's (mostly) free and makes unencrypted MKVs of DVDs and BluRays.  I have used it hundreds of times and it works well.

If you really want to insert a DVD (or BluRay) and play it directly, MC is not the right tool.

Brian.

Brian, thank you for your help.  I just read this (your) response after posting about an issue concerning a problem with CD ripping where I repeated my problem about DVD recognition.

I don't really want to play or rip a DVD with any program.  I just want to be able to catalog my small video library in MC as I'm able to do with my fairly large audio library.  But I understand now from your response that that will not be possible using MC for Mac's tools.

Thanks again.
David

[blgentry]

It's possible to catalog DVDs (and other things like LPs) with MC, yet not have the media "ripped" into MC.  I personally have never needed this capability so I haven't researched it much.  On Windows there is an MC 3rd party utility called DataFiddler which really helps with this.  But it only runs on Windows. 

There are ways of doing this manually by importing MPL and/or CSV files.  Here's one thread that discusses it:

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=87939.0

If you are feeling very adventurous, you might google "JRiver catalog DVD only" and look at some of the threads.

It won't be automatic.  It won't be easy.  But it is possible if you are really into it.  I would probably make dummy MKV files named for all of my movies and import them one by one (to get the correct movie title recognized by MC).  After all, that's exactly how I import my real rips now.  I name them so that MC will guess correctly at the movie title.  Then if MC gets the wrong version of the movie, I correct it in the "get TV and movie info" dialog.  All MC does is note that it has a new file that corresponds to this movie title.

I recall a thread a while back where someone created a special "1 second long" MKV so that MC would recognize it.  Then he copied it over and over again to new titles for each of his movies.

Now that I've typed this out, it actually doesn't seem that hard.  Just a little bit laborious.  Though no more laborious than ripping each DVD!

Good luck.

Brian.

[dhampny]

Thanks, Brian.  I actually did spend a good deal of time Googling this and reading a lot of related threads, some by members who were getting it to work in Windows.  I just never had any luck, or the skills maybe, to get any to work for me.  A big part of my problem was not knowing until the last couple of days that MC for Mac can't even see a DVD or Blu-ray movie when inserted in a disk drive.

I'm currently having some email conversations with MrC who may be able to help me catalog my small movie collection in MC.  As I told him, I enjoy watching movies but am not a collector, as I am of audio.  I really just wanted to, and imagined that, keeping track of my collection of DVD and Blu-Ray movies in MC would be a trivial undertaking.  Of course, I've since learned that is not the case.

I appreciate the time you've taken trying to assist me.

David