Fun with Mac Tweaking (Front Row Hack)

As you may or may not know i consider myself a bit of a Apple Front Row hacker. I love making this lovely piece of software from apple do things it's not suppose to do. An early example that was featured partly in a episode of Hak5 and also available via the wiki is voice activated front row and getting it on older G4 based systems. My new little trick comes from MacOSXHints and that is how to add a bunch of external drives with video on them and have them show up in Front Row.

What i am using:
- Tiger 10.4.11
- WD MyBook USB Hard Drives
- Random 4 port USB Hub

Step 1: Go into finder and hit the key combo  Shift-Command-G (Go To Folder Command) and type in /Volumes.

Step 2: While holding down Command-Option drag the Volumes folder into the movies folder. This essentially makes a short cut to the folder which holds all your external and internal devices like drives, CD-Roms, Thumb Drives, etc.

Step 3: Chain up your USB devices into the Hub in my case about 1TB worth of drives holding anal retentively foldered video files collected over the past few years all in high quality iPod format. (I am a sick man)

Step 4: Open Front Row and go to Videos/Movies/Volumes and you will see your newly added external drives all mounted and ready to play with.

Real World Uses:

• DVD server using handbreak to rip movies onto external drives in high quality quicktime/mp4 format.
• Media Center addition for large stores of video content.
• You get the point.

This method along side a MacMini is the basis of Alice Mach 2 my media center setup years in the making. More on Alice and a textfile of this document for sharing with friends will be available via www.sxe13.com/RL soon.