I push all the buttons around here.

All the avid Mac users are probably thinking right about now that I’m stupid. If I would store my media files in the right places according to the OS X specifications, Front Row would just work with zero effort. That is absolutely true. However, my needs were a little more complicated than that. My media content is scattered across my network.

One PC has the iTunes library; another PC has all the videos. Notice something? No media is physically stored on the mini. I have over half a Terabyte of media archives and I had no desire to move any of it. So in order for this media center to work for me it would have to work across a windows network.

Front Row is far from perfect. There isn’t a single setting you can change. It is what it is and users are expected to deal with that. It integrates with iTunes to find music on the local machine and looks in the ~/Movies folder to find additional media.

Browsing my music collection on my PC using Front Row was the easiest to set up. I just had to share my music collection in iTunes on the PC. iTunes on the mini automatically picks up the share, and so does Front Row.

It was more challenging to get my videos to show up. Since Front Row is looking in a certain folder for media files I had to have a way to make it think the files were there. The best to do this was to use an alias. An alias is a dynamic reference to an object (or a pointer). It’s not a shortcut; it’s a shortcut on speed. I created an alias referencing a network share and put it in the ~/Movies folder where Front Row expects to find them.

Now, Front Row is seeing all of my music and media across the network. However, the task of making Front Row play nice is far from finished.