Adding Media to Front Row

Just got my macbook a couple days ago. Still confused on some things, especially Front Row. I read somewhere that it is capable of playing any movie that Quicktime can play. I already installed all the codecs and players and everything so that I could play AVI in Quicktime. I am just wondering now how to add movies and music so that they will play in Front Row. Can it only play mp4 and quicktime files?

I have some success with playing divx encoded AVI files. However a lot of video files of different format doesnt play. I havent yet installed different codecs make it play as i am really not in a hurry.

Front Row accesses the music in your iTunes. If you want to play it in Front Row, add it to iTunes. To play a movie in Front Row, just put the movie in your Movies folder. AVIs work fine in Front Row.

I tried playing a mpg in front row and it didnt work. and is there any way to change the folder that Front Row gets the movies from? I keep all of my movies on an external hard drive, and they wouldnt all fit on my macbook HD.

I think an alias of the movies folder on your ext HD would work for front row! Not too sure tho but worth a try?

ok, i dont know what an alias folder is, since ive only had this for a few days. how do i do that?

Paul G said:

I think an alias of the movies folder on your ext HD would work for front row! Not too sure tho but worth a try?

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Thats right. Create an alias of your movies folder in the external drive and throw that into the movies folder in your mac. It really works great.

Just right click or hold ctrl and click on the folder and go down to the 'make alias' option! Then place this in the movies folder for front row! Then when u connect ur ext HD the alias will be used as a kinda portal to the folder on ur ext HD! Hope it works, I have the missing manuals for Mac OS X, its well worth buying so u can find out stuff like this! Hope that helps!

wow thats awesome, thanks. These things continue to amaze me. How do I put tv shows into front row? is that only thru itunes? because i have a bunch of south park episodes i would like to categorize under tv shows. But since they are not in itunes, do they have to be categorized under movies?

lpdude said:

But since they are not in itunes, do they have to be categorized under movies?

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yes, if you want them to go under the TV Shows heading you have to add them in iTunes.. which doesn't take AVIs

So I added all my media to this alias folder, and i didnt realize that it moves the movies onto the macbook hard drive also. What is the point of an alias folder then? I needed some way to access my external HD on front row without taking up all the space in my macbook. Is this impossible or did I do it wrong?

No no no. Just make an alias of the folder that all your movies are stored in on your hard drive. Then move that alias folder to itunes. That's it. The Alias links back to the original folder with all your movies. It does all the work for you.

i just place alias's of folders containing my movies inside the movies folder. works for me