Centos, MakeMKV and External Drives

For most of the last two years, I have been using an HP Microserver as my media server (running plex) and general development server running on CentOS 7. A few months ago I bought an external Blu-Ray writer, specifically a Samsung SE-506, for use with it.

In the past I have tried MakeMKV for extracting MKV files from some old home made DVDs, and I wanted to try this directly from the server. I had two problems when trying this:

1. The drive was not supported by the libusb version supplied with the version of CentOS which was available at the time, fortunately the release of CentOS 7.3 brought the support I needed.
2. MakeMKV was unable to use the attached drive unless it was being ran by root.

In order to allow MakeMKV to be able to access the drive when ran as a non-root user, a new udev rule is needed. My drive is mounting as the device “/dev/sr0”, so I created a new file “etc/udev/rules.d/80-bluray.rules” with the content:

    KERNEL=="sr?", MODE="0666"

This file will target any “sr” device and change the permissions so it is accessible by any user (the default permissions where 0660). More details are available in the udev documentation - it looks to be an enourmously powerful utility.