2008 iMac External DVD/CD Player plays no movies

[gholmes1936]

iMac 2008 OS10.9.1 Samsung external dvd won't play movie DVD's. Other DVD/CD's are recognized. My internal DVD/CD player/burner stopped working 3 years ago like many other iMacs did.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.😕

 

[Bear]

iMac 2008 OS10.9.1 Samsung external dvd won't play movie DVD's. Other DVD/CD's are recognized. My internal DVD/CD player/burner stopped working 3 years ago like many other iMacs did.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.😕

When was the last time the external drive played DVD Movies? (What OS version?) And did you try running DVD Player after inserting the disk - if so was there any sort of error message?

 

[gholmes1936]

When was the last time the external drive played DVD Movies? (What OS version?) And did you try running DVD Player after inserting the disk - if so was there any sort of error message?

Before installing Maverick, and quite awhile before that. Tried running DVDPlayer to access the movie DVD and there was no error. When I selected the DVD Icon on my desktop I could see all the data packages involved in it. When I tried using VLC I got the same thing. In another forum somewhere in the great Gore-o-sphere I read that it might be possible to use VLC to

 

[Brian33]

It's my recollection that the Apple DVD Player app doesn't work with any external DVD players in any machine that originally included a built-in DVD player. I've got an Early 2008 24" iMac, and I use an Apple external USB optical drive because I replaced the internal optical drive with a 1 TB HDD.

I recall that I made an edit to a system file that allowed the external drive to be used with DVD Player and to allow booting from it. It involved using a hex editor to a "kext" file but wasn't difficult. I'm sorry I can't check into it more at this moment -- you can try google or I'll get back here tomorrow hopefully.

I can assure you that the Apple USB Superdrive at least can be made to work with DVD Player...