MacBook Air M1 2020 DVD Player won't play DVDs

So we ran into this ourselves. We haven't found any fixes yet. That is until today. We upgraded another Mac to Monterey today. All this machines can play the DVD like it used to. The old MacBook Air with M1 chip that had BigSur still does not work.

Hope the helps

I have been assisting someone who has the same problem. MacBook Air M1 2020 was playing DVDs on her Apple DVD External Hard Drive and it suddenly stopped working. This might have been after a recent OS update. She can currently play CDs but not DVDs. It recognizes the title but nothing more. She has tried to play it using both Apple’s DVD Player software and VLC with no success. Both drive and the disks work on other computers.

Apple has seen the computer: they have reinstalled the OS three times and most recently also replaced the system board, all to no avail. I suspect that this problem is related to OS update, but cannot be sure.

This is just an update on this issue. The computer was seen again by Apple and they concluded that the functionality was suppressed by an OS update. Apple recommended waiting for the next OS update to see if it would be fixed.

This is an issue with 11.6. You can use the free app VLC or update to Monterey to make all work. Here is link for the free VLC app:

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html