M2 Air not playing dvds

I don't get it either. with aftermarket drives, it seems to be hit or miss as to wether they will work through a hub. but apparently, with the superdrive, it needs to be plugged in direct. I personally always have the superdrive plugged into my iMac. a few weeks ago I made the same assumption that a powered hub would work. it was explained by others here that it would not work that way. so since I have a powered hub, I tested it. the superdrive wouldn't work. but just to make things a little more complicated, I've seen it mentioned here that OWC sells a powered hub that they say will work with the superdrive. so I'll say the jury is still out on this one

First, the player by itself will not show on the desktop, but the DVD should. Have you made sure that your Finder Preferences are set to show external disks, etc on the dektop? And yes, it may need to be plugged in and any player or burner works best if it has its own power source.

The Apple Super Drives have been known to draw more power than some Mac ports can provide. It is a very old design and there are many modern, more power efficient designs available.

The solution would be to connect it to a powered USB hub and then to the Mac. Not a great solution but should solve the problem.

That's interesting. I have always used my LG drive through a hub with different Macs and have never had an issue reading or burning.

Of course they were all hubs with their own power supply.

Can we assume that they are standard DVDs and not Blu-Ray DVDs?

Blu-Ray DVDs are not supported.

Well, it could be that the connection to the Mac does not supply enough power to play a movie. You'd have to check the power requirements of the players and the port on the Mac to see how much it supplies. I do not know what they would need - I bought mine with its own power supply.

My DVD player actually specifies to NOT use a hub (do not know why), but only a direct connection.

woodmeister50 wrote:

The solution would be to connect it to a powered USB hub and then to the Mac. Not a great solution but should solve the problem.

I tried connecting my superdrive to my powered hub and it did not work. the superdrive needs to be plugged in directly to the Mac to work. and many aftermarket optical drives (but not all) also have that requirement.

No, I said it doesn't (actually, I haven't used any hub in many years; the device is at least 10 years old and I was told at the time that I should NOT use a hub). It still has a FW 800 port (!!). But it still works!

None of these responders are even considering the M2 issue. If Anyone knows Anything useful pertinent to his question, please advise. I have the same issue & feel like apple is failing its customers Big Time. MacBook Air M2 not reading apple SuperDrive.

My burner/player is an older self powered OWC brand and does say not to use with a hub. Have never had a problem with various flavors of Macs.

so then I'm guessing that your drive is the one I've heard of that comes from OWC that works with a hub?

ok. sorry, I misunderstood. I think i had a small brain fart.

Yes. Standards.