Pioneer BDR-XD05S Blu Ray drive working with MacOS Monterey 12.6.1 Mac Mini M1

After some trial and tribulation, I was able to get a Pioneer BDR-XD05S Blu Ray drive working with a Mac Mini M1 executing Monterey 12.6.1.

I am running it through a fast USB hub as well.

Initially it did not show up in the finder.

I rebooted the Mac Mini with the drive installed.

The system report was able to see the Pioneer drive under the USB connection to the hub.

However, it was not until I installed a DVD disk to play did the drive show up in the finder side bar along with the disk on the desktop.

I am using VLC version 3.0.18 Vetinari (Intel 64bit) so it is not native to the M1 silicon.

I was also able to use Apple's DVD player app version 6.0(5500.72) to play a DVD disk in the Pioneer drive. However, Apple hides this DVD player application from you so you need to search and find it. Once you find it, you can create an alias and put it in your applications folder so you can more easily find it. For whatever reason, the Apple DVD player app seems to provide greater audio output.

Even though this blu-ray drive is no longer supported by Pioneer, it seems to function so far.

I have not tried burning any disk. However, if you can see it in the finder one should be able to burn a disk.

This Pioneer Blu-ray drive/burner does not support 4K or UHD blu-ray disks.

I mainly purchased this drive used in order to watch DVDs/Blu-rays because Apple's SuperDrive does not work through a USB hub. With the Mac Mini M1, there are not enough USB ports - you need a USB hub to provide more. The Pioneer does take up two USB 2.0 ports, one for power and one for data, so your hub should have a lot of USB 2 ports.