How can I have VLC play my DVDs automatically?

First off, credit where it's due: a succinct, albeit somewhat confusing answer to this question is offered up by Michal over at Macosxhints.com (see here). The problem is, most Mac users have no idea how to "create and save" an AppleScript. So let me offer up a more detailed tutorial.

First off, if you just want VLC to start up when you insert a DVD, but you'll have to actually find the DVD then click "play" to get it to start playing the movie, that's easy. Go to Apple Menu --> System Preferences and choose "CDs & DVDs":

Click it and you'll see this:

To have VLC start up instead of DVD Player, simply click on the "Open DVD Player" menu, choose Open Other Application, find VLC in your Applications folder, and click "Choose". That's all there is to it. If you don't mind having to munge around in the file system to find the newly inserted DVD and click "Play" each time. :-)

There's a smarter alternative, as Michel shows, but it requires you opening up the AppleScript editor and writing a very short little program...

Start out by launching Applications --> Apple Script --> Script Editor. You'll see this starting window:

Now, ever so carefully, type in exactly the following:

It'll look like this with the automatic formatting in the Script Editor:

Almost done. Really. You can do it. :-)

Now, just choose File --> Save and save the script in a well-known location. I suggest the same place that you have the VLC app, or a new directory called "Scripts" in your Applications folder. Here's what I did:

Last step. Back up in this article to where I show you how to choose VLC instead of DVD Player and instead of choosing VLC in the "CDs & DVDs" system preference, choose "Run Script..." and choose your new script. When I do that, I now see:

That's all there is to it. Now when you insert a DVD, VLC launches and starts playing the movie!

By the way, I don't think it'll take long for the crack team at Videolan.org to add "autoplay newly inserted DVD" as a preference, and perhaps even to allow you to specify a preferred view too (e.g., normal, half size, full screen, etc). That'd be kewl...