You can enable auditing on the player (Displays page -> Edit display -> Advanced tab)
Create a display profile with log level set to auditing, perhaps even with this How to get a Windows Player log for advanced debugging
the path does not need to be to the library /log.txt, but it’s a reasonable choice.
After you have that new display profile, you’d need to assign it to your display on Displays page -> edit -> advanced tab.
The either Log page in CMS (you can filter the logs to show only messages from this display + adjust the duration), or the log created in the path you’ve set in the new display profile.
Regarding date format, is it the default one with international dates now?
Could you try it, perhaps on a separate layout, without the background image, just to confirm that it’s not a problem (it shouldn’t be, but I’d like to confirm that).