I've been buying physical media and want to save digital copies for SD card. I had no issues with my CD for music but DVDs don't work.

I have an optical drive that I plug in and it works. VLC with libdvdcss installed through Discovery failed. I tried MakeMKV but it doesn't detect the optical drive.

If you got MakeMKV via Flatpak, you may want to get Flatseal, and manage permissions. It may not have access to that device.

Is it a permissions issue? If you're running software through flatpak, do you need to enable access to the optical drive device through flatseal?

This is the first I've heard of flatseal I'll definitely check it out and see

I'll check because I used another software through Discovery for the CD and it worked

Flatpaks are often restricted on what resources they can access because of how they work. I am not sure of the exact option you will need; but my guess is under devices, you can allow USB devices, and specific folder paths and it may work.

This is a dumb question, but is your optical drive only a CD drive, or does it support DVDs?

It says it supports DVDs. I was able to mount it and look at the files but I couldn't do anything with them

You might just need a DVD drive, but are using a CD drive. They look almost identical, but are different types of disc. Fortunately, DVD drives can use CDs just fine so you wouldn't have to juggle the two.

If you didn't grow up with optical media this would be a very easy mistake to make (I've even seen millennials and gen x mix them up). If you want to cover all your bases, a blue ray drive would be the thing to get but I'm not sure offhand about Linux compatibility. Probably fine though.

That makes sense. I double checked the box and it says DVD-RW 3.0 USB

Time to continue troubleshooting then, good luck! The Flatseal comment sounds promising.

I use makeMKV as a Flatpak and never had to change any of the permissions, although it’s true that F’atpaks have restrictions.

But I never tried it on my Steam Deck.

Maybe OP has another computer he could try MakeMKV on.

sudo modprobe sg made MakeMKV detect my portable Blu-ray optical drive on my Steam Deck

I just tried that and I'll post the fixes below. I had to add a folder in FlatSeal. Now all I need is to update the region because of the mismatch error code.

There's also "application permissions" in settings

Are you able to playback DVDs through VLC?

On my computer, I'm able to first run lsdvd and then rip the DVD to an ISO file using dd. If I don't run lsdvd first, dd fails.

Granted, I'm not using an immutable OS.

My thought is because of USB access. It wouldn't allow that by default. But if OP has a computer with a built in drive, it's worth a test.

Not yet. The only thing I have to figure out now is how to change the region in MakeMKV