Rubin Shrestha
Rubin Shrestha
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How to access M DISC Video storage on macOS?

by |Published

I’d really appreciate some help storing a folder of videos (mp4 and mov) on an mdisc. I bought these discs and this drive:

  • Verbatim M DISC BDXL 100GB 6X: With branded surface blank Blu-Ray recordable media.
  • Verbatim External Slimline CD DVD Blu-Ray Writer: USB 3.2 Gen 1 drive M-Disc ready compatible with Windows 8/10/11 Mac OS X 10.6 or higher Blu-ray Burner.

I’m on a MacBook Air (Intel) from 2018 running macOS Sonoma 14.7.4 (although today, I am receiving the MacBook Air).

Six months ago, I burned the folder onto one of the discs but when I tried to play any of the movies, I got “vlc is unable to open the mrl file” for all except the first two (alphabetically) videos in the folder. The disc also says it has no more available storage even though the videos added together are far less than 100gb.

Now I feel silly coming back to this six months later that I did not take any notes on what I did six months ago to burn to the disk. However, I thought before I potentially ruined another M Disc, I would ask if any of you can let me know whether the following plan looks good to you and what else you would do differently; everything I could find online was about PCs or very vague:

My sense was that I would:

  1. Plug in the drive and disc.
  2. Create a new burn folder in my desktop.
  3. Download the folder from my Google drive to that burn folder.
  4. Open the zip file inside the burn folder.
  5. Click “burn.”
  6. Open the files from within the disc to see if they will play (try both QuickTime and VLC).

Does anything in those instructions (or any step I skipped) look like the kind of thing calculated to make VLC complain “vlc is unable to open the mrl file”?

Edit: thank you, @music2myear! Here are my responses to their suggestions

  1. Copy the data off the disk to local storage: I get “the finder can’t complete the operation because some data in can’t be read or written. Error code -36” when I try this
  2. Use multiple different applications to try opening/playing them.: I cannot open them with quicktime or VLC
  3. Access the files on a different computer, using a different optical drive.: This is the second computer I have tried and failed with. I do not want to purchase another drive until that seems to be the only option left. This is the only optical drive I own that reads/writes blueray.

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