FrontRow 1.0 Tips & Tricks :: Videos

Posted on | February 22, 2006 | 1 Comment

FrontRow is an awesome little MediaCenter application by Apple. Included with the G5 iMacs and now with the Intel iMac and MacBook many users are utilizing this amazing application as the heart of their Macintosh Media Center experience. Utilizing these tips you will get the most out of FrontRow and your user experience.

Hopefully I will have multiple pieces to these tips and I can keep it updated, before Apple adds more features! So lets start with Videos.

Videos -> TV Shows:

Taggers: TV shows from iTunes already have their tagged information, but what about videos you download from other sources like GoogleVideo. Download Lostify or AtomicParsley to modify your individual TV Show meta data. I would recommend using one or the other, but not both. I had originally started with AtomicParsley, then upgraded to Lostify but after using both, and shows would appear twice in FrontRow’s listing of TV shows. It has to due with Losity applying an underscore after the TV Show Name, but the underscore does not render in FrontRow.

TV Show Tags for FrontRow use.

FrontRow does not utilize all the Atom Tags that iTunes can. In fact FrontRow appears to only use 4 of these tags.

Kind: This is where you specify the mp4 or m4v as a TV Show. This will allow the show to appear as a TV Show within FrontRow and iTunes.

TV Show Name: The name of the show. (i.e. The Office)
TV Season: This is specifically the season number as a 1 or 2 digit numeric number. (i.e. ’2′ produces ‘Season 2′ within the TV Show Directory) For sports games and clips I will use the year as the season. (i.e. Probowl 2005)

EpisodeNum: This is generally the season + episode. This tag is not show in FrontRow, but it determines the order the episodes are listed. (i.e. 0315, Season 3, Episode 15)
TV Show Title: This is simply they episode title. Its the last bit of data you will see in FrontRow before you pull up the blanket, and grab the popcorn. (i.e. Who Shot Mr. Burns)

File Tags vs. Database Tags:
Tag your shows outside of iTunes. iTunes 6.0.2 allows you to set the TV show types. This is great but it tags don’t apply to the files, but apply iTunes Database. If you have to rebuild your iTunes library and you re-import theses files, you will have to retype them all. Use Atomic Parsley or Lostify and tag them outside of iTunes. This way they will always return to their proper types.
Note: Mov files need to be tagged in iTunes. they do not have the proper AtomTags within the file to store this information.

Videos -> Movies:

Handeling Movies:
I wouldn’t suggest importing movies into iTunes. Why? Because iTunes can do a decent job of organizing them and sorting them, however FrontRow will only utilize the ‘Name’ field. This gives you a large list of movies from Tutorials, to Home Movies, to Feature Films.
My solution is to utilize the ~user/Movies folder which FrontRow already reads. Within here I recommend setting-up several folders for my various categories of movies. (ie. Drama, Comedy, Home Videos, porn etc… like your local video shop) When FrontRow loads it scans the User’s Movie folder and subfolders for mp4, m4v, and mov files. So now you can navigate in FrontRow to Movies->Home Movies->Johnny’s Soccer Game. This beats the long list of unsorted and uncategorized movies.
External Movie Storage:
I know your hard drive is only so big and you may not be able to store all of your movies in the local drive. Using the tip above categorize your movies and then create an alias of the folder and drop it in the Movies directory. FrontRow won’t know the difference, and be happy pulling movies from a faster external hard drive.

Videos -> Music Videos:

The same tips apply to Music Video as TV shows, however, TV Shows utilize the Artist, Album, Track, Disc, tags in iTunes rather then the TV Show, Season and Episode tags.