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7 Essential Front Row tips

by Scott Bird | December 10, 2006
Filed in Apple , Favourites , Tips and techniques

Front RowFront Row seems in many ways to be one of Apple’s forgotten children. Underneath the simple exterior, however, is quite a powerful beast. Here are 7 ways to squeeze a little more out of it.

1. Sync the remote with only one computer.
If you’ve got multiple Macs and their corresponding remotes (as in a store, school or even home setup), you’re probably growing tired of the fact that a click on one remote opens Front Row on several machines. To prevent this, pair each remote with its intended machine by pointing the remote at the usual target (Apple logo for iMacs, left of the latch for MacBook Pros) and hold Menu + Next for 5 seconds.

An icon of two chain links will appear to indicate that the pairing was successful.

2. Open and close Front Row using keyboard
The default key combination used to open Front Row is Command-Escape. To change this, enter your System Preferences, open the Keyboard and Mouse Panel, and navigate to the Keyboard Shortcuts Tab. Scroll down to the Front Row section and change to the desired combination.

If you want to quickly exit Front Row using the keyboard, press F11 or F16. Other options are to press the Home key (which will leave the music and video playing, just exit Front Row) and the key combination Command-Option-Escape, which will quit Front Row (and everything playing) instantly.

3. Installing Front Row on any Mac running Mac OS X (10.4.5 and above)
Andrew Escobar has detailed instructions on this on his website. As long as you have a PowerPC Mac (the Intel Macs all ship with Front Row and a Remote), with a minimum of the items listed below, installation is a straightforward affair.

You’ll need :

4. Use the Front Row Remote to control other applications
The Front Row Remote can be used to control many things within OS X Tiger, including :

5. Play Xvid, DivX, and 3ivX using Front Row

The logic behind this one is simple. Front Row’s multimedia capabilities lean heavily on Quicktime, so just installing the various codecs on your machine isn’t enough. You’ll need to install the Quicktime compatible versions of each.

Links to each of them - as well as a detailed explanation of their installation and use - can be found at Paul Stamatiou’s site.

6. Using Front Row to play media on external drives

Let’s face it, transferring everything to the internal drive of an iMac isn’t too bad; but the novelty wears off quickly if you’re using a MacBook. Storing your massive media collection on an external drive not only makes sense, it’s possible for Front Row to see it.

How? Aliases.

An alias is just a pointer to another location (if you’re making the switch from Windows, think of shortcuts). To make an alias, open the Finder window for the external drive, locate the folder which contains the media you wish to play via Front Row, and drag it to the relevant Front Row directory (such as ‘Movies’) whilst holding down the Option and Command keys. Alternately, select Make Alias from the File menu, and drag the resulting folder across.

7. Play movies from VIDEO_TS folders

Although Front Row itself doesn’t support movies in VIDEO_TS folders, DVD Player does. Squished Squirrel’s DVD Assist (an Applescript ‘stay open’ applet) bridges this gap by closing Front Row upon selection of a video in a VIDEO_TS folder and opening it in DVD Player. Glorious.





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Comments

1

On number 5, instead of downloading them all seperately... Use perian: a codec that contains them all in one + more

heres Paul Stamatiou's post of it:
http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/09/30/perian-bringing-vlc-like-compatiblity-to-quicktime/

Posted by: Drew | December 11, 2006 1:05 AM

2

Nice article! Thanks for the read!

Posted by: Michael Skelton | December 11, 2006 1:12 AM

3

You can exit Front Row by pressing just about any key. It is not restricted to f11 or f15.

What about putting an alias to the volumes folder in your movies folder?

Posted by: DC | December 11, 2006 1:29 AM

4

Great article. Front Row is something that i use like 3 times a month, but its still very nice.

Posted by: Edwin | December 11, 2006 2:45 AM

5

Great article, great tips. Now if only someone would find a way to play iPod content out of Front Row... then I'd probably make up my mind about buying a mac as a media center computer.

Posted by: Nando Rossi | December 11, 2006 3:13 AM

6

Um. regarding iPod content. if it's the mac you sync your ipod with, you will ALREADY have that content, because it's in iTunes (it has to be, to get it onto your ipod).

Posted by: Stephen | December 11, 2006 3:30 AM

7

Stephen, not all of us sync our iPods in that way. I can use iTunes at the office, without having the songs on my work system.

But FrontRow will play off of your iPod.

1) Open iTunes and start playing a playlist that is on your iPod.
2) Open up Front Row and go to "Now Playing."

It will show you the song now playing, with artwork, you can then navigate forward / reverse like normal. You can't change playlists, but the ability is there.

Why they don't allow accessing the iPod more directly, I don't know.

But it is possible.

Posted by: AlexC | December 11, 2006 4:22 AM

8

NOT all intel macs ship with frontrow and a remote.... all but the mac pro...

Posted by: Marcus | December 11, 2006 9:38 AM

9

Cheers for that link Drew. I've already got all of the codecs installed on both Macs here, have you tried Perian at all? Looks good.

DC: not quite sure why, but I'm a little hesitant to link straight to the volumes folder. Is that the way you do it? Any benefits?

AlexC: I'm hoping that the iPod integration will be just one of the improvements in the next version of Front Row. It does seem a little bare.

Marcus: right you are. I stand corrected.

Posted by: Scott | December 11, 2006 2:05 PM

10

Front row is very simple to use. I just can't wait to see his integration with the iTV.

----------------------
Wanna get the most out of you mac?
Visit www.mostofmymac.com

Posted by: Themacthinker | December 11, 2006 3:15 PM

11

I got a Mac Mini just yesterday and I have to say Front Row was a big let down. I have a lot of music and video content on my ReadyNAS which I point iTunes at. In iTunes I can create playlists containing videos but there aren't any playlists at all listed under the Video category of Front Row. Instead you will find these video playlists via the Music category (under playlists!) but if you choose one, it only plays the audio track (it thinks it's music).

Also, there is no way to categorize video content beyond show name and season (i.e. two tiers). Front row won't allow you to browse via genre (e.g. Comedy, Horror, etc)

For some reason the DVD player component won't play my backed up DVDs (on DVD-Rs) and completely crashes the Front Row. I suspect it's because the region code hasn't been set yet - but even so crashing Front Row is a bit extreme.

Finally, FR is pretty damn slow at times. I have no problem with this content in iTunes (the mac is connected to the NAS directly via a gigabit connection). Selecting TV Shows (which contains about 30 shows) sometimes takes several minutes to load. Before anyone complains that it must be something else I am running, this is an out of the box mac mini bought yesterday, content imported to iTunes and then Front Row fired up. This machine is as clean as you can get.

Don't get me wrong, I am not mac bashing (I own 3 of them) but I do think Front Row needs a lot of work yet. Maybe it will be more polished in Leopard.

Posted by: dazzyb | December 12, 2006 12:00 AM

12

It doesn't seem to want to work for music aliases...hmm

Posted by: Han | December 12, 2006 12:20 AM

13

I don't get it. Is it possible for me to play the music I got on my iPod via Front Row without transfering or copying it to iTunes first? I tried to do as it says above using Aliases but just can't make it work... Could someone please walk me through this?

Thanks!

Posted by: Johan | December 12, 2006 10:39 PM

14

Is it possible to program the remote to turn on an imac when not in sleep mode?

Posted by: Jason | February 17, 2007 11:54 PM

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