If you connect an external USB SuperDrive to your modern Mac (or if you are still rocking a vintage MacBook Pro with a built-in optical drive), macOS exhibits a classic, albeit sometimes annoying, behavior: the moment you insert a DVD, the built-in DVD Player app automatically launches, steals focus from whatever you were doing, and attempts to play the disc.
While this is helpful if you strictly intend to watch a movie, it is incredibly disruptive if you are inserting the disc to rip it to a digital file using Handbrake, or if you simply want to view the raw files inside the DVD using Finder.
Fortunately, you can customize your Mac’s default behavior when inserting optical media.
How to Stop the DVD Player from Auto-Launching
You can adjust how your Mac reacts to different types of discs directly within the System Settings (or System Preferences).
- Click the Apple Logo in the top left corner of your screen.
- Select System Settings (or System Preferences on older versions of macOS).
- Scroll down the left-hand sidebar and click on CDs & DVDs. (Note: This option will ONLY appear if your Mac currently has an optical drive connected to it. If you use an external USB drive, plug it in first).
- Look for the dropdown menu labeled When you insert a video DVD.
- Click the dropdown menu and change it from “Open DVD Player” to Ignore.
Customizing Other Disc Types
While you are on the CDs & DVDs settings page, you may want to adjust how your Mac handles other types of media:
- When you insert a blank CD/DVD: By default, macOS asks what to do. You can change this to “Open Finder” if you frequently burn files to discs.
- When you insert a music CD: By default, macOS opens the Apple Music app (or iTunes). Change this to “Ignore” if you intend to rip the CD using a third-party app like XLD or Exact Audio Copy.
Once you change these settings to “Ignore,” your Mac will silently mount the disc to your desktop (or the sidebar of Finder) without interrupting your workflow with auto-launching applications.