DVD Player app won’t work with 2011 external Apple DVD drive

I bought an Apple DVD drive in 2012 to play movies on my 2012 iMac which had no internal drive. I used it a lot until I bought a new iMac in 2021, then not at all until today. The old iDVD app didn't work on Sonoma, and the newDVD Player app doesn't seem to work with the old drive. The drive gets power from the USB cable but will not accept a disc. Is that a hardware problem or a software problem? If software, is there a way to get the new DVD app to work with the old drive?