Yosemite, DVD Player and external drives

[MacInWin]

I have the MBP shown to the left in my profile. I have Yosemite installed and running well. I had previously applied a hack to DVD Player that involved editing the framework file to change all "Internal" references to "External" when I removed my internal optical disk and replace it with a second HDD, but when I tried the same trick under Yosemite, I get an error when invoking DVD Player that it didn't find a suitable drive. It won't even initialize.

So, anybody found a way to use external optical drives with DVD Player under Yosemite?

 

[chscag]

Jake... I don't know if this is going to help, but the DVD player works with an external drive and Yosemite in my machine. However, my iMac (late 2013) has no optical drive and that might be the difference. Looks like you may have to find another hack to get it working with your MBP which does technically have a drive even though you removed it.

 

[MacInWin]

OK, chscag, is there any way to "uninstall" the nonexistent drive? Some hack to make OS X admit there is no optical drive internally mounted?

 

[MacInWin]

I found a hint to get rid of the file "IODVDStorageFamily.kext" from /System/Library/Extensions, and when I rebooted, About This Mac shows only my external DVD as Media Burning, but DVD Player still won't initialize, disk in or not. Still looking for an answer.

 

[kcft]

I recently installed an SSD drive instead of the optical drive in my iMac 27". I also bought an external Pioneer bluray burner/player but I noticed that DVDPlayer would not work.

I tried to modify the DVDPlayback framework as suggested in other posts/forums but it seems things have changed in Yosemite. I was not able to find the words or hex codes for internal or external in the framework so I was not able to complete what used to be an easy fix.

However, I finally solved my problem by copying the DVDPlayback framework from my mac mini (also running Yosemite) that does not have an internal optical drive. It works fine now! I hope this helps, but I suggest making a backup of your DVDPlayback framework before attempting this fix.

 

[MacInWin]

Thanks. Unfortunately, all of the Macs I have have or had an optical drive in them. What's strange is that if Yosemite went looking for an optical drive when it installed, it would NOT have found one, so I'm puzzled why it installed the framework for optical drives. I did find the External/Internal words and hex in the framework and changed them but it didn't work in Yosemite like it did in Mavericks.

Still looking for a solution, short of buying a mac mini without an optical disk and copying the framework like you did...

 

[kcft]

Ok, just a hunch here... It seems that at some point you did have two optical drives showing in About my Mac? And now it only shows the external one, but that was after applying the IODVDStorageFamily fix? If that is the case you may want to try to re-install the DVDPlayer now that it only shows the external one. I am not sure what is the best way to reinstall (through Pacifist? doing a complete reinstall?) but that may be worth trying.

In my case I believe I had the wrong framework because I removed the internal optical drive after installing Yosemite.

 

[MacInWin]

Yeah, I might try that, but when I upgraded to Yosemite, the external was NOT connected, so it shouldn't have found it. It was an upgrade, not a nuke and pave, so it could have picked up that there had been a drive at one point, so it's a possibility. I just was hoping to avoid going through nuke/pave. For now, I'm living without DVDs on it, and it's not that distressing, so I may just wait until I HAVE to nuke/pave for some reason.

 

[MacInWin]

I used Pacifist to reinstall DVD Player from the Yosemite installer, but I still get the same error. During the installation, there was NO optical drive attached, in an attempt to mimic not having one ever. Does the installer somehow go back to Apple to see what the original configuration was? Am I doomed? I attached the error message I am getting.

 

[MacInWin]

Should I disconnect the internal SSD that is in the optical bay and try Pacifist with that drive disconnected? The About This Mac system report properly shows no burner attached, but it does show a drive on the SATA/SATA Express hardware as a Medium type Solid State. Could it be confusing the installer in that it sees hardware in the bay, so it assumes it to be optical?

I'm trying to avoid a nuke/pave operation just to get DVD Player working. And based on the failure of Pacifist to solve the issue, I'm not sure nuke/pave will work, either, unless I can find out how it thinks an optical drive is present.

 

[chscag]

Just a WAG here Jake, but it may be obtaining that information from the firmware (hardware makeup). An optical drive is supposed to be there according to the firmware, but yet none is present. I'm not sure how you're going to fool it in order to install iDVD. Is it honestly worth all the gyrations you're going through?

 

[MacInWin]

Probably not worth it, but I'm retired and have nothing else to do...idle hands are the Devil's workshop, you know!

 

[MacInWin]

Oh, and iDVD works fine. Just DVD Player isn't. I am using VLC for now, it's more out of curiosity to find out WHY DVD player won't work than anything else.

 

[dalcorta]

New to the forum so if this comes in without a subject or in bad format, my apologies.

I have had the same issue. I mid-2010 27 inch iMac in which I have replaced all of the internal drives with SSDs and was having no troubles using an external Blu-ray player/ DVD- reader/burner with the DVDplayback framework hack until the Yosemite upgrade. I repeated the OxED External/Internal hack (not sure if cap no cap on editing is an issue but used first letter cap) and for me the player would open, expand into full frame mode, play the sound but no video would show (I have dual screen setup).

Sort of gave up and was using VLC but revisited it again today after finding this forum.Thinking about it I realized the Player was starting so maybe the issue is a video bug. So I opened the DVD player preferences and turned off "When DVD opens: Enter full screen mode". Now DVDs start in small screen with proper audio and I can expand this full frame and cycle between small and full frame without issue.

Not sure this work-around will work for MacWin but may point some one more knowledgable in the right direction. And hopefully this will survive future updates. Oh yeah, I am running 10.10.1 with Multibeast trim enabler installed (had this installed when upgrading from the .0 to .1 update and didn't get a grey screen on reboot).

Cheers

 

[MacInWin]

Thanks, but I can't do that. DVD Player doesn't initialize, so I can't get to the preferences. I've given up, use VLC for DVDs.