Using optical drives with Pinephone

[cdforever]

Hello all, I'm curious as to whether anyone has been able to use an optical drive such as a USB DVD drive with a Pinephone or Pinephone Pro?

My use case is - my preferred way to acquire music is to buy a CD. I would like to set up a Pinephone as a one-stop shop for listening and ripping CDs. I have been able to do this before with a Samsung Galaxy S20 5G under Android.

My Pinephone running Postmarket OS recognizes USBdevices and can also run with a Nexdock. It can read flash drives too. If I use an optical drive, including powered variants, it shows under lsusb but not fdisk -l.

Before I go down a complete rabbit hole trying to get this to work, I wanted to ask if anyone had used this setup with any success? Or if it works on a Pinephone Pro I can upgrade. I'm wondering if the hardware supports it but there's something missing at the Linux kernel level, or need certain drivers.

Happy to post logs etc. but mainly wondering if anyone else has made this setup work previously?

[zetabeta]

i haven't tested usb based optical drive on pinephone regular or pro. i have a desktop and laptop. however i recently used optical drive to read some disks into hard drive for storage.

i don't know does arm based pp need drivers for usb optical drive. maybe i test, but not quickly. physical power is an issue though.

optical medias will not be shown in fdisk or lsblk, they work little differently.

my guess is, this is a bad idea. i would use x86-64 computer for this.

you may want to check following programs though. these are text based programs.

cdparanoia
crdskin
wodim

following is what i think of optical medias:
https://barrelmem.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaw...201632.jpg

[cdforever]

Your image made me laugh. I often feel similar about optical media...

Okay so - it turns out that reading optical drives requires the kernel module sr_mod. This is not included by default in Postmarket OS or Manjaro for Pinephone. I tried installing Mobian instead - it doesn't seem to be activated my default but you can use:

sudo modprobe sr_mod

And it activates. It will then read the optical drive!

Interesting learnings...