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I would like to see what DVDs have been played on my Mac OS X Tiger laptop. Can you tell me how to view the file that contains this information?

Chealion
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    Good question. There is a "Last Play" dictionary stored in "~/Library/Application Support/DVD Player/Settings/Shared Settings.plist". There are also two corresponding files for each entry in the same directory. But I don't know how to decrypt/decode this information. – knweiss Jan 06 '10 at 17:59

2 Answers2

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The DVD Player app keeps some information about discs that it has played, but the storage is keyed by some sort of hash (the main part of each filename is a 16 hex digit number).

The info is stored in plist files under ~/Library/Application Support/DVD Player/Settings/, but those bits of information might not be terribly useful. My collection of files represents 40 “unique” discs, but only two of them have a “MediaName” key that gives a meaningful name to the disc to which the data corresponds.

Here is a short shell script to extract any MediaName keys that exist:

for f in ~/'Library/Application Support/DVD Player/Settings'/*.plist; do
    medianame="$(defaults read "${f%.plist}" MediaName 2>/dev/null)" &&
      printf '%q is %s\n' "$f" "$medianame"
done

Or, if you are OK with assuming that the plist files are all in XML format:

grep -A 1 MediaName ~/'Library/Application Support/DVD Player/Settings'/*.plist
Chris Johnsen
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  • It appears Apple deliberately obfuscates this information, as on OS X 10.8.2 I see only *.enc (presumably meaning "encrypted") files instead of the individual plists for each media. There's only the Shared Settings.plist that is readable. – webjprgm Jan 04 '13 at 04:21
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If it's quite recent, you could go to the Recent Items menu in the  menu.

JFW
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