replace mac dvd drive to external hard drive

To access, read and write the DVDPlayback framework file you will need to download a free Hex editor app, 0xed by Suavetech.Telling OS X DVDPlayback Framework to Work With External Optical Drives This sounds easy on the face of it, but here comes the geeky part – its not written in regular human English – its written in Hexadecimal programming language, or Hex for short.

You will need to modify some code embedded into OS X’s DVDPlayback framework essentially replacing the words “internal” with “external”. There is a workaround but be fair warned that it is quite a geeky one. If not, ‘tell the user that DVD Player will not play nice’ which translated in OS X speak is “A valid DVD drive could not be found ”. Nine times out of ten, the USB optical drive is not at fault.Īpple Inc has fiendishly encoded a check into OS X to verify whether the attached USB optical drive is in fact an Apple USB SuperDrive. Note: this is not the signal to panic and go running back to the store you bought your third party USB optical drive at to scream at the vendor for claiming that it was “OS X compatible”. That’s when users gawk when they see this: The trouble really only becomes apparent when a movie DVD is inserted into the USB optical drive and an attempt is made to view the movie using the Apple DVD Player application. Provided the third party USB optical drive is compatible with OS X, for most part there usually isn’t much fuss or muss in the realm of burning CDRs or DVRs or reading data CDRs or DVRs – most times it truly is a plug and play affair.

Notwithstanding which situation you are in, Apple (obviously) encourages the purchase of Apple’s own external USB SuperDrive either as an add-on option or replacement, respectively.Īs good as Apple USB SuperDrives are, most opt to purchase non-Apple external USB optical drives, since more often than not the price point makes more sense. There are also those who have older Mac portables which shipped with optical drives which have either broken down or the owner has elected to extend the life of their beloved Mac portables by displacing the optical drive with an additional hard drive (HDD) or Solid State Drive (SSD) by adding a third party hard drive caddy. By default, the latest Mac portables now ship sans an optical drive.

Replace mac dvd drive to external hard drive