Blu-ray burning in Finder fails with an error

What is the make and model of the burner, and is it bus-powered* or self-powered**?

If bus-powered, is it connected directly to the computer or to a dock or hub.

Optical drives need a lot of power because, like mechanical hard drives, they must have power not only for the electronics but also an electric motor. Lack of power is high on the list of suspects when an bus-powered optical drive acts badly. An old electrical engineer told be that electric motors can begin to draw more power as they age. Some external drive failures reported here seem to support that. A bus-powered drive works for several years without issue and then, with no other changes, start to fail due to the computer's USB port being unable to satisfy an increasing power demand.

The usual fix for bus-powered drive showing low-power symtons is to get a self-powered hub and install it between the drive and the computer.

* — Must get all power from a computer's USB port

** — Has an power supply independent of the comptuer

den.thed wrote:

vtpeters wrote:

In the past I could burn Blu-ray discs using the method described above using the Finder and it worked fine.

The last time I did so successfully was before the upgrade of macOS to Tahoe.

I wonder if a change in the OS might cause the burning to fail now.

No old OS X or later macOS version has ever natively supported burning or playing Blu-ray Media.

You must have been using some third-party Blu-ray software, that now needs to be updated for Tahoe.

I will second this observation. macOS has never directly supported burning or reading Blu-ray Discs. Steve Jobs was vehemently against it since it required paying Sony licensing fees for the technology and as such it was never implemented. He famously called it "A bag of hurt".

https://www.wired.com/2008/10/jobs-blu-ray-is/

If it worked before, it's because you were using software that allowed this and probably added an extension for Finder to directly burn Blu-ray Discs. But make no mistake, you need the software to be working to burn blu-rays. If you are burning regular DVDs or CDs it should work o.k, unless the non-working extension is causing issues with that too.

If the software or extensions it installed don't correctly work on macOS Tahoe, you will need to find an update for it.

You may have been using things like Roxio Toast or Finder Burn and forgot about it since it had been working correctly.

vtpeters wrote:

The burner I a Samsung SE-506 portable BD writer.

I bought it new quite a few years ago and have successfully burned blu-ray's with it on my MacBook Pro M1 for at least 4-5 years.

That device dates from nearly 15 years ago. There are a number of (some ancient) posts in various online forums regarding issues with the device, including need to update drivers and the BD writer requiring increasing amounts of power over time as it wears out slowly. Some users utilized a Y-type USB connector to get more power to the device (on Windows machines, not just Macs) so it would continue working. Others noted that a symptom of the laser wearing out or requiring increasing amounts of power over time was that burning stopped working while reading discs still was possible.

It's powered via the only USB port is is connected to. I use a USB-C to 4 x USB-A connector to hook the writer up to the MacBook because the MacBook only has USB-C type ports.

You can search online but some users (both on PCs and Macs) reported that over time, increasing amounts of power were required to get this device to continue to work, some successfully power combined two USB ports to accomplish this. The 4xUSB-A connector you are using might be dividing the power among its multiple ports, making this worse. You might try a different adaptor for better power throughput.

This all worked fine in the past.

I don't think the Mac has ever supported native writing and playing of blue-ray video but writing and reading of blue-ray data discs has been possible, albeit not officially supported. This means that at any time, an update to the MacOS might mean that something that unofficially worked might stop working.

I guess I would be more concerned about the age of the device and its laser showing wear and tear. There are many complaints online (dating back to 2017 and earlier) about this device's laser not being very robust and wearing out earlier than expected.

I think blue-ray media are also now considered an outdated type of media, supplanted by low cost external HDD and SSD and even thumb drives.

steve626 wrote:

vtpeters wrote:

This all worked fine in the past.

I don't think the Mac has ever supported native writing and playing of blue-ray video but writing and reading of blue-ray data discs has been possible, albeit not officially supported. This means that at any time, an update to the MacOS might mean that something that unofficially worked might stop working.

This is a good point.

I guess I would be more concerned about the age of the device and its laser showing wear and tear. There are many complaints online (dating back to 2017 and earlier) about this device's laser not being very robust and wearing out earlier than expected.

Indeed. The aging burning laser may be requiring more power now than it did before and that is available and causing the process to stall or halt entirely if the laser cannot get enough power. This is a common occurrence with aging optical drives.

Regardless, working with blu-rays has never been natively supported on Macs, the fact it worked before for burning data discs is just a a convenient happenstance and should not be relied upon.

The only real solution at this point, is to try to use a different drive and see if that works, but again since blu-rays aren't officially supported and never have been, its not a good idea to rely on their continued functionality.

What software are you using to burn? Mac does not support natively.

vtpeters wrote:

In the past I could burn Blu-ray discs using the method described above using the Finder and it worked fine.

The last time I did so successfully was before the upgrade of macOS to Tahoe.

I wonder if a change in the OS might cause the burning to fail now.

No old OS X or later macOS version has ever natively supported burning or playing Blu-ray Media.

You must have been using some third-party Blu-ray software, that now needs to be updated for Tahoe.

Here's the bottom line. macOS has NEVER supported burning or playing Blu-ray CONTENT. You may have burned data to a BD disc but it was not Blu-ray content, i.e. a Blu-ray movie. It simply cannot be done no matter what you claim, period. Burning any kind of commercial DVD or Blu-ray for "backup" purposes cannot be done natively on macOS. You must have specialized software to bypass the copy protection, software which we are not allowed to discuss in these forums. You have never burned Blu-ray content because macOS has never supported it natively. So you are either confused over what you were actually doing or feeding us a line of you-know-what. To be blunt we don't believe your story and many of us have been using macOS for decades and understand how it works.

Continuing this line inquiry will be futile. You have to live with it. There is no bug to report or overcome. There is no help to be found here.