Let’s say you purchase a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive — PS5s with disc drives are the best models, after all — and pop in a disc. It will probably start playing automatically. But you might still get an error even if you insert the disc correctly. Either the disc is too dirty to read, or it’s the wrong format.
Currently, PS5 consoles only support Blu-Rays (including standard and Ultra HD Blu-ray), DVDs, and official game discs. You don’t even need to worry about the region, so if you buy a game while on a trip overseas, it should work on your console. However, the PS5 cannot run audio CDs as it lacks the equipment needed to read them. You can still play music on the console, but you need a USB drive formatted as exFAT or FAT32.
If you want to play a Blu-ray or DVD in your PS5, it should work 99 times out of 100. However, Sony has noted that a rare few won’t work because of an odd manufacturing process or software encoding method. Normally, you can’t tell which DVDs will and won’t work until you try them, with one exception: If a disc or case says the contents are encoded in HD-DVD (a discontinued format designed to compete with Blu-ray), it won’t run on a PS5. Also, we must mention the odd disc format known as DualDisc (not to be confused with the Duel Disc from the “Yu-Gi-Oh!” franchise). Manufacturers that create DualDiscs encode at least one side in DVD format, but if the other side uses any audio format, that specific side won’t work on your PS5. If you want to listen to that content, you will need a CD player.
Rewritability does not guarantee usability
As with most rules, you can find plenty of exceptions to the PS5’s list of supported discs. For example, while the PS5 normally can’t read any game disc older than the PlayStation 4, you can use a workaround emulator to play PS2 games on your PS5. Conversely, when we said the PS5 supports Blu-Rays, we did not mean it supports all Blu-Rays.
Rewritable CDs have been a pillar of the computer and entertainment industries for decades. Your old VHS tapes won’t last forever, so if you want to preserve them, digitize them and copy them onto rewritable DVDs — or the newer BD-R and BD-RE discs. The idea is the same but with Blu-ray technology. However, if you want to play one of these burned movies on your PS5, check the format first, as the console doesn’t support BD-R, BD-RE XL, or BD-RE ver. 1.0. However, these are far from the only rewritable Blu-ray formats out there.
Rewritable Blu-ray currently has five versions, the most recent of which is BD-RE ver. 5.0, which was released in 2017. The PS5 support site doesn’t list most of these versions, so we can assume that, based on these exclusions, the PS5 might be able to play movies and shows written on BD-RE ver. 2.0 or later. But until Sony says otherwise, that is just an educated guess at best.
