Impossible to get USB Blueray drive properly mounted in VM

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NightSky

New Member
Jul 6, 2025
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Hello,
I'm trying to mount an external USB Blueray drive on a VM to use with MakeMKV. This worked perfetly in my ESXi machine, and the setup was really easy. This seems impossible in Proxmox, though. I found a lot of tutorials on how to modify config file: non worked and none are easy to carry out.
Is there something that I'm doing wrong? Is there an easy way to get a passttough that works? Or I should simply switch back to ESXi?
Thank you
 
Hello,
forwarding a device to a vm usually doesn't require to edit the vm's config file. This can be done via GUI.
Select the vm, head to the Hardware settings, click on Add and select USB Device
1751822593634.png

Now you have two ways for selecting the device, either by Vendor/Device ID and select the device from the dropdown list or you forward the entire USB Port, on which the device is connected to.

1751822705940.png

That's it.
 
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fba said:
That's it.
Click to expand...

Thank you. In theory everything shoudl work, problem is that MakeMKV seems not happy. I think it has to be able to issue specific SATA comands, and has to clearly access Blueray reader on the lowest level possible.
 
NightSky said:
Thank you. In theory everything shoudl work, problem is that MakeMKV seems not happy. I think it has to be able to issue specific SATA comands, and has to clearly access Blueray reader on the lowest level possible.
Click to expand...
What's the error you get, when running MakeMKV in the vm?
 
Kingneutron said:
Not everything needs to be virtualized. You should be able to install minimal X and makemkv on the host, or use another PC
Click to expand...
True, but let's assume that I'm not asking on an ideology and that I have reasons why I'd like to have it on a VM rather than user (yet another) dedicated machine ;)
 
fba said:
What's the error you get, when running MakeMKV in the vm?
Click to expand...
Molstly it stalls on trying to load the CD rom. This evening I will try to see on logs what happens when I connect it as a CD rom (it loads the disk, but doen't work anyway). Probably one solution would be able to install a CD rom as passtrough.
 
I managed to passthrough the whole SATA controller connected to a M.2 slot for my SATA Bluray drive. In the past I've used a SATA-to-USB converter and passed through the entire USB controller. I have never managed with USB passthrough, only with PCI(e) passthrough (of the relevant controller).
 
leesteken said:
I managed to passthrough the whole SATA controller connected to a M.2 slot for my SATA Bluray drive. In the past I've used a SATA-to-USB converter and passed through the entire USB controller. I have never managed with USB passthrough, only with PCI(e) passthrough (of the relevant controller).
Click to expand...
This is interesting. So... how the heck VMWare ESXi manages to do this without any fancy SATA-to-USB hardware? This is really the only thing that's holding me back to VMWare... (and it pisses me off quite a lot).
 
NightSky said:
So... how the heck VMWare ESXi manages to do this without any fancy SATA-to-USB hardware? This is really the only thing that's holding me back to VMWare... (and it pisses me off quite a lot).
Click to expand...
You would have to ask VMware. Maybe try USB passthrough with Xen Server or unRAID or TrueNAS also? It's not the main focus of a clustered enterprise hypervisor like Proxmox nor Linux QEMU/KVM in general. Other hypervisors work differently and have different strengths.
Alternatively, you could try USB/IP and pass the USB optical drive from another bare-metal Linux system to our VM over IPv4/v6. I was successful with a USB 2.0 dual TV tuner from OpenWRT to Proxmox.
 
Still, quite a pity that I have to keep a VMWare machine up just for this task. I think Proxmox could really get everything done, even better. Turns out it is not so.
I found some possible solution online. None have worked for now. The best I got is getting MakeMVK stuck while trying to initialise the drive...
 
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