Hi there,

I've passed through my device to the container with both device names but it just sits like this after MakeMKV has loaded:

Any ideas what might be going on? It's the same with a blu-ray or DVD disc. The drive is in a USB enclosure in case that matters...

Thanks!

I think it's related to the recent MakeMKV versions. I went back to 1.17.7 via the repo tag (1.17.7-4-01) on the container config and it works fine with this old version!

On 12/31/2025 at 12:14 PM, CodeThief said:

I think it's related to the recent MakeMKV versions. I went back to 1.17.7 via the repo tag (1.17.7-4-01) on the container config and it works fine with this old version!

Thank you for the suggestion, but it didn't work for me either. I finally ended up switching to jlesage/makemkv, and it's working fine.

On 1/15/2025 at 12:09 PM, xra said:

I think I have another solution for "The program can't find any usable optical drives." that does not require changing the user and group to root (😱)

 

Maybe this was above somewhere but I did not see it.

 

STEPS:

Start the container.

Go into the containers console

Determine the group that has permissions to your /dev/srN and /dev/sgN devices that you added to extra params.

 

In my case I ran:

ls -l /dev/sr0 /dev/sg7

and got

crw-rw---- 1 root log 21, 7 Jan 15 12:41 /dev/sg7
brw-rw---- 1 root log 11, 0 Jan 15 12:41 /dev/sr0

 

so the group "log" has "rw" access to both devices (that's r-ead w-rite and both are needed)

 

Run:

getent group log

I got

log:x:19:

19 is the group id in this case

 

Now edit the container in Unraid

Show more settings

Set PGID to 19 (or whatever you got)

 

Let me know if it works for anybody

 

Setting the PGID to the group worked for me!

Ran into this same "can't find any usable optical drives" issue after an Unraid update (7.3.2). Confirming that xra's PGID fix from earlier in this thread worked for me too, with one small correction: on my system the group that owns /dev/sr0//dev/sg8 is actually named cdrom, not log — worth checking both since it can vary by system. Posting the exact steps in case it helps someone else:

Fix:

1. Check which group owns your optical drive devices:

ls -la /dev/sr0 /dev/sg8

2. Get that group's GID number:

getent group <groupname>

(for me this was cdrom, GID 19 — yours may show log or something else)

3. Edit the binhex-makemkv container in Unraid, set PGID to that GID number (leave PUID as-is).

4. Click Apply to recreate the container.

5. Reopen the MakeMKV GUI — drive should now be detected and "Open disc" available.

That's it — no --group-add, capability flags, or udev rules needed. The key insight is that the container's PGID needs to match whatever group actually owns the device nodes on your specific host, which can differ by system/Unraid version.

Edited July 15Jul 15 by Virtech