Sometime ago I had expanded a Macbook Pro by adding a 2nd internal hard drive in lieu of the built-in DVD drive. Attaching an external DVD drive worked for data DVDs, however once I tried to play a DVD movie, I got a “Valid DVD Drive Could Not be Found [-70012]” error.  A bit of research on the web brought me to this article, however herein lies another example of being careful of “what you paste for because it just might (not) happen” ™.  

In the article, which I am happy to have come across, the hint is to do a string replacement of some text in an Apple-supplied file under MacOS.  The author of the article states that if you have a problem following the instructions, its probably because you made a mistake “in the 2nd command”. Figured this is another example of not just pasting whatever you see out there without having some understanding of what’s being done. The fix is to replace a backtick with an apostrophe, right after the “-e”.

So while you do always want to make a backup of a file you’re about to modify, I’d probably put into another directory:

sudo cp /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback /var/tmp/DVDPlayback.bak

Then, the proper syntax for the actual replacement should be:

sudo perl -pi -e ‘s|\x49\x6E\x74\x65\x72\x6E\x61\x6C|\x45\x78\x74\x65\x72\x6E\x61\x6C|g’ /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback