We’ve been trapped inside our homes for months. We’ve reached the end of Netflix, listened to everything on Apple Music, watched old vacation videos trying to remember what travel was like, and mindlessly browsed YouTube videos. All these actions have been recorded in your unified logs!
I came across this one while researching another topic and thought it might be useful and a quick write-up. Turns out it wasn’t as quick as I had hoped – so many different scenarios to test! I’d still like to dig into this one a bit more as it can be quirky as noted in the last section. While sometimes odd, I think this information can provide insight into what media a user is viewing on their systems - not just macOS, but iOS as well.
The query below will show information related to media that is “Now Playing”, not just on the computer that the logs came from, but also potentially other AirPlay connected devices. There will be many entries but we will only focus some in this article.
log show --predicate 'category = "MediaRemote"'Movie time in the Photos.app
Gather the family and start reminiscing over vacation videos. You might bring up Photos.app and search for various videos that you were going to show all your friends and family (and never actually did, but you just HAD to get that video.)
In the screenshot below, the ‘MediaRemote’ is what we are filtering on in the query above (highlighted in yellow).
Various pieces of data get recorded in the unified logs. In many entries you should see the bundle id or application name being used – in this example Photos or com.apple.photos. A good keyword to look for is “client-“ before the bundle id for the app.
You can also see two sections that contain media metadata that includes:
Media Duration (in seconds)
Elapsed Time – We can use this to determine how long it was viewed/listened to.
Item Identifier (GUID) – This GUID changes over the period of viewing so not a great filter for a specific file. It will change if media is stopped, paused, etc.
File Path & Name
This video is 10 seconds long, using the elapsedTime entry we can see that it was played all the way though.
The file path is in the user’s Photos Library package directory which is not surprising. This filename however, is not the original filename of this video. We can use ‘xattr -p’ to print the extended attribute that contains this data (com.apple.assetsd.originalFilename). Using the original file name IMG_3586.MOV we might be able to do a search across the system to find other artifacts of its use and more metadata in the Photos.sqlite database including a running count of how many times it was played.
MOV Files in QuickTime
Maybe you don’t use Photos.app, instead you downloaded the movie to your macOS system and viewed it using QuickTime player (com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX). Many of the same metadata pieces are still there but the filename might look strange to you. This is a good example of a “File Reference URL”. This is the same video I used as the example above. I exported it out of Photos using the original filename, IMG_3586.MOV and saved in the Downloads directory.
In the screenshot above the elapsed time is 00:00:00, and duration is 00:00:10 (10 seconds). Below, the elapsed time is 00:00:05 (5 seconds, actually closer to 6 if we round up.). I started the video, watched ~5 seconds and played out the rest of the video (these additional entries are not shown.) The playback rate entry appears to be a 1 while playing and a 0 while stopped/paused. A GIF of this action was recorded below. Featuring a playful elephant at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney.
Getting back to that “File Reference URL”, you probably want to find the original file as part of an investigation. We can use the inode section of the URL to find it. In this example I renamed IMG_3586.MOV to elephants.mov. Most forensic tools should be able to query for a file system inode number. Inode numbers do not change when a file gets renamed.
Finding a sense of calm with Music.app
I queued up a new album by one of my favorite classical musicians, Ludovico Einaudi. An Italian, who created this album while in quarantine at his home in Italy. The album includes 12 songs, and one video (not shown in the screenshot.)
We can see the queue count for Music (com.apple.Music). While I listen to this album, it will tick down, one-by-one.
Finding the End of the Internet
To get a few laughs, I used Safari browser to watch clips of Archer on YouTube. Safari is not listed as the application, but com.apple.WebKit.WebContent is – this is a signature of Safari WebKit being used. Surrounding entries (not shown) will show hints that Safari.app is being used as this time.
In Chrome, I went to watch videos on the BBC and found this excellent video of a dog who helps rescue Koalas in Australia (running theme? 🤔). We can see the Google Chrome (com.google.Chrome) app is being used, but it may not necessarily state the website. You may have to determine this using other user activity artifacts (browsing history!).
What about AirPlay?
The media examples above were all viewed on a local macOS system, what would it look like if I used my extensive Apple ecosystem of devices? Might as well use these devices for “research”, right?
While doing this research, I was watching one of my favorite older television shows, Alias using Amazon Prime Video (com.amazon.aiv.AIVApp) on one of my Apple TVs. Every episode that it would run though would show entries on my Mac. My Mac had nothing to do with my binge watching, but the entries were recorded anyway…cool! I should note that if the system is not being used (laptop shut), these entries do not appear in my logs. The Apple TV is named ‘Living Room’.
Of course, I also have a HomePod and stream music and news to it all day long. In this example I’m streaming from my macOS laptop to my HomePod named StationX. I have found that the elapsed time doesn’t seem to update as the examples above did.
Quirky? Yes.
While doing this research and testing various applications, I came across entries while I was most definitely sleeping. Seems my laptop wanted me to listen to the radio very, very early in the morning for about 15 seconds. 🤷🏻♀️
Do entries like this make all the examples in the article inaccurate? Absolutely not. Computers act in weird ways. This is a great example of why correlating this information to user activity through other means (ie: sleep status, device unlocks, user activity in knowledge, etc.) is required in investigations.
I hope this article gets you thinking about all the other apps that you watch media from. Again, this is not just on macOS but also on iOS (and likely tvOS as well). All those applications, native and 3rd party, are just waiting to catch you binge watching your favorite show, finding the end of YouTube, and rocking out to your favorite 90’s boyband jams!