The drive is made by Rioddas, and says it is compatible with iMacs. The (terrible) manual says to install VLC Media Player, which I already had installed anyway.
iMac 21.5″, 13.5
You get what you pay for with these brand-x companies. Did they expressly say it was compatible with macOS Monterey or Ventura? If they said macOS 10.6 and later, it is a crap shoot for compatibility. The crappy effort at the manual suggests that Rioddas probably does not offer a firmware update for later versions of macOS.
There is a reason I spent the money for the Pioneer BDR-X13U-S blu-ray burner because it was expressly stated by Pioneer to support Monterey and currently works on my M2 Mac mini Pro with Ventura 13.5. I have no burner software for macOS that supports this device and I did not want to fork the money for the latest Toast, or DVDFab (china) software. The VLC 3.0.18 software works fine for playback.
It said it was compatible with all versions of Mac OS, and I couldn't find any negative reviews regarding Mac in the 14000 reviews available.
I've just tried it on my wife's MacBook Air that is running Mojave and it doesn't run on that either, but it does on my little Windows laptop with Windows 11, so it's going back tomorrow!
a new CD/DVD external drive is not being recognised on my iMac (2019) running Ventura 13.5
