Fix DVD Won’t Play on Mac (iMac/Macbook/Pro Included)

What is the biggest and most unignorable flaw for a Macintosh? A majority of the movie or music lovers will vote for the DVD incompetence.

Since the sales of 13in Macbook Pro, the last Mac model that was equipped with an optical DVD drive, ended in 2016, every Mac, including iMac, Macbook, or Pro, CANNOT read and play DVD, unless you pay for the extra Apple SuperDrive or other external DVD drives.

Even though your Macbook or iMac has the SuperDrive connected, still, when playing DVD with it in your Mac, errors occur. Notifications like ‘This DVD won’t play on Mac’, ‘Supported disc not available’ will pop out and your plan for movie viewing will be interrupted.

Luckily, there’re multiple ways to fix the error. You can blissfully play and watch DVDs on your Mac after you resort to the methods below.

1. Convert DVD to MP4/AVI/WMV/MKV/MOV

There’re, maybe, dozens of factors that your Mac won’t play DVD and accordingly, dozens of fixes. You may try each method separately, which is time-consuming and really complex.

If you hate to go over a series of factors and take complex fixes, or your ultimate goal is just to watch the movie, you may convert the disc content to your Macintosh as MP4 or any other regular video file formats. In this way, no more disturbing notifications saying errors will ever bother you. And more importantly, no more disc, just open QuickTime Player to play the movie.

To convert the DVD content into your Mac, you’ll need a DVD converter tool. Here, Tipard Blu-ray Converter will be of great help.

This is a very easy-to-use tool that allows you to transform the content from an encrypted or coded DVD to a regular video format losslessly. There’ll be no sign of a drop of frames or resolution on the output movie. All you have is a lossless and smooth motion picture just like using the disc.

Let’s see how to convert the DVD into regular formats then.

Step 1 Download this DVD converter onto your Mac

Step 2 Start to convert the disc

Insert the DVD into the drive and launch the ripper.

Step 3 Enjoy the movie

Tipard Blu-ray Converter will start the conversion, on a pop-out window, you can view the current progress.

When the process is done, locate the video on the folder, enjoy it.

2. Check if the disc is smudged or scratched

A stain or scratch will affect the stability of your Mac DVD drive to read the disc. If luckily, the stain or scratch is very tiny that the Mac DVD player may still play it and skip the polluted segment. But when it goes big, the disc is completely unreadable.

So, you need to take out the disc, wipe it clean with some cleaning kits. If it’s scratched, polish and wax it to repair it.

When the damage is too deep that the disc still won’t play on your Mac even after the repair, buy a new one or try another DVD for movie appreciation then.

3. Make sure the Mac DVD drive isn’t broken

Sometimes, the DVD drive on your iMac/Macbook may crush due to accidental knocks or hits which you haven’t realize.

So, you’d better check if the failure for DVD playback is related to a broken drive. Take out a DVD that works fine and pop it into the drive. Open the Mac DVD Player program and start to play the DVD.

If it fails to play the movie, then your drive is broken, send it to repair or replace it.

4. Try available system update

Originally, every Macintosh doesn’t have a DVD Player installed. Only after a DVD drive is inserted into the machine, your system will start to install a Mac DVD Player program on the computer automatically. However, sometimes, your Mac system may fail to download this program due to undefined bugs so that you cannot open the DVD on your Macintosh successfully.

To play DVD on your Mac, you need to update your system to remove the bugs and enable your Mac to retrieve the capability of Mac DVD Player auto-download.

This is how:

Step 1 Unplug the DVD drive first.

Step 2 Then, click the Apple logo on the top right corner of your Mac desktop and choose System Preferences from the drop-down list.

Step 3 From the System Preferences window, click Software Update, and see if there are available updates. Click Update Now when there’s any.

Step 4 When the update is complete, insert the DVD drive and pop the disc into it. This time, your Mac should download the DVD Player software successfully and play the DVD.

5. Change the region code of your DVD drive

If your DVD drive ejects the DVD automatically, both the disc and drive share the different region codes.

Some DVDs bear region codes which is the digital technology that allows DVD publishers to control the global distribution of a DVD sale. One coded DVD requires a DVD drive of the same region code to play.

• Case in point, a UK DVD in Region 2 cannot be a player with a US DVD drive in Region 1.

Luckily, every DVD drive will give customers a few chances to change the region code of the drive itself is set to. The first time, you insert a disc in Region 1 into a drive in Region 2, the drive will detect the disc and pop out a notification for you to change the code manually. But, such modification is only available 5 times.

So, when the auto-eject happens to you, the Region codes they labeled are incompatible and you miss the pop-out notification for changing code. Or simply, the 5-time limit runs out already.

First, check out how to change the Region code for your drive:

Insert a DVD into your Mac and a notification pops out asking whether you want to change the drive region. Choose the one that fits the disc then, click OK to confirm. After the change, Mac DVD Player should work just fine to play the disc.

6. Download another DVD player software

The Mac DVD Player software has a very disappointing downside that it CANNOT play DVD-RW(Recordable&Rewritable) discs but only DVD-R(Recordable) discs. As a result, when you pop a DVD-RW disc into the drive and start to play it with Mac DVD Player, “Supported disc not available” will come out. And surely, no more motion picture will begin.

In this case, all you have to do is to download a more powerful DVD player and use it to play the disc.

Now, let’s see how to play DVDs with Aiseesoft Mac Blu-ray Player.

Step 1 Download this DVD player on your Mac

Step 2 Pop in the disc to your Mac

Step 3 Start to play the DVD

Launch the program and click Open Disc on the interface, locate the target disc, and click OK.

This DVD player will start to display the frames for you. Just enjoy the movie.

To warp up:

All 6 methods can help you watch DVDs on your Macbook/iMac. Now, start to try them and enjoy the DVD. Just keep one thing one mind that when your Macbook or iMac just cannot play the DVD content directly, try using a DVD converter app, Tipard Blu-ray Converter for example, to transform it into a normal video file for viewing.