Does Mac OS X store the names of DVDs that have been played?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

If it's quite recent, you could go to the Recent Items menu in the  menu.