Force Front Row To Use Rosetta?

Hi,
i can get my wmv encoded avi's to run in quicktime without pixelated distortions using rosetta, but how do i get front row to use rosetta when playing back the files as without rosetta i've found flip4mac to be quite useless. (Latest version btw)
Any help from one of the many mac geniuses that lurk on the forum would be great.

I wish I had an answer for your Goldin. Front Row itself is a Universal Binary and cannot be told to run under Rosetta. There might be a way to force it to under unix.
Are the file types actually WMV? How about just converting them to something a bit more friendly like MPEG-4 or MOV?
Cheers!

Similar Messages

Forcing Front Row into Rosetta (For 3ivx and a52 codecs)

I've been very happy with my Mac Mini so far and my only complaint is that Front Row will not allow me to play movies encoded with 3ivx and a 52 codecs. I have found a way to get them to work in Quicktime (by forcing it into Rosetta) and I have figured out how to force Front Row into Rosetta but it still doesn't work. One of the other forums I consulted suggested that the problem is that Front Row uses Itunes with embedded Quicktime movies. I was hoping that it would be as simple as forcing Itunes to open with Rosetta but I have not been able to figure out how to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Please do not point me to the Apple file telling you how to force apps into rosetta. It does not work for Itunes.
Thanks!
G

Well you may want to convert the said videos and audio files into a format Front Row does support. http://www.versiontracker.com/ and http://www.macupdate.com/ list many solutions for playing and working with those file formats.
I see you have already found the Front Row forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1164
Maybe some people there may have additional answers if you can't find them in this one.

Force front row to play video on 16:9 aspect ratio

Hello, I would like to know if there is a way to force front row to play a 3:4 video in 16:9 aspect ratio.
As you can imagine, I have a 16:9 TV and I would like to see it, better in 16:9.
This can be done very well by Quicktime, I don't know why it seems not to be possible to do on Front Row.
Look forward to reading some answer.
thanks,
pvazquez

No, Front Row just plays them as they are flagged.
Even if you could, the video would be stretched and people would be short and fat!

Sharing iTunes and then using Front Row

I have been downloading all the album artwork just like everyone else is, now that iTunes 7 is out.
I have run across a small problem and a fix I would like to pass along for people having problems viewing the album artwork on a computer that is sharing the iTunes from another computer and then using Front Row.
First off, the artwork for me seems to work fine on all individual computers that have the songs and the album artwork on it.
When I shared my 'master or main' computer iTunes with my Mini Mac Intel, I then played the music using Front Row but the majority of the album covers would not show up.
For some reason only a few of the album covers were showing up in Front Row on the shared computer. It took me quite awhile to figure out that the only album covers that were showing up were the album covers that I dragged and copied onto the main computers iTunes album window.
I don't know if anyone has found anything easier to fix this problem but I went ahead a copied all of the album artwork, one by one, on the main computer into the iTunes artwork window. Now, all the computers that access the main computer via sharing, shows the album artwork when using Front Row.
I hope I explained this clear enough.
Here is a photo of my Mac Mini hooked up to my TV, playing Front Row and using the shared iTunes Library from my main computer which is an iMac G5.
http://users.sisqtel.net/jkriz/MacMini/frontrow_albumcovers.jpg
I needed to use the flash for this photo because it was getting dark but I think you get the idea.
I know I could have put all my music on the Mini Mac or any of my other computers and I wouldn't have had to go through all of this... but then I would have trouble keeping all of my computers music up to date. This way, I only have to keep the main computer up to date with all of my music. Much easier.
If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.
I hope the rest of you can benefit from this tip.
iMac 17 (Intel), iMac G5 (Rev B), Mac Mini (Intel) Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Bizmarck,
Well, this is interesting.
When I first read your question I said to myself, of course I can play the shared slideshow along with the selected shared music.....
Well, I'm glad I tried it out first before I posted this as I cannot play the selected songs on the shared slideshow. All I could play was the Minuet in "G"....
I could have sworn I used to be able to do this with 10.4.7 and Front Row 1.2
However, I could be wrong.
I have tried everything.
I have the Serving computers iTunes and iPhoto open and to allow sharing of both.
On the Mac Mini which is playing the shared items from the serving computer, I can turn off the music but I cannot select a song from the shared library in iPhoto. All the library shows for music selection on the Mac Mini is the music that is on the Mac Mini.
Apparently Apple has more work to do if this is going to work.
It is interesting to me that we cannot play a shared slideshow along with the shared music that was selected with that slideshow.
If the selected song from the shared slideshow is already on the Mac Mini, then I can choose it, but I cannot choose any other songs unless they are on the Mac Mini.....
It seems that Front Row will not play the selected shared song from the shared slideshow. Front Row only wants to play the songs that are on the Mac Mini for any of the shared slideshows... BUMMER.......
If you open iPhoto (not Front Row) on the Mac Mini, then select a shared slideshow, then click on the 'Play' button. You will see that Minuet in "G" is selected to play on that shared slideshow. I turned all of mine OFF for the time being as I am tired of the sample music also.
If I come up with anything new I will post it here.
Thanks for sharing this information.

Force HD TV show to SD in Front Row

I previously purchased an HD TV show from iTunes for my older MacBook Pro HTPC. I get horrible choppiness when watching in HD, but not for SD in iTunes. In iTunes, I can set a preference for watching the show in HD or SD (right-click on the episode and choose the SD version).
How do I force Front Row to do the same?
TIA

I'm replying to my own thread, but the only way I can think of doing this (and I've been successful), is to physically move the HD files out of the TV Shows/title directory somewhere else. Then, Front Row can only play the SD files.
Seems to work...

Have Front Row Default To Another Source Instead Of Home iTunes

Hey All,
Curious if anyone knows of a script or app that allows me to force Front Row to default to a specific source upon loading?
I have all my movies and tv shows setup on my main system in my bedroom and everytime I load front row, I have to scroll down and choose the source I want.
I know there are tons of little apps out there for such things like this (like TV Row chooses which monitor to send Front Row to instead of your main monitor), so I would hope someone knows of one. I have been searching on the net for the past week, but usually I just get links to media center apps that have the keyword Source in them.
Thanks!
Tim

I have the exact same problem.
I think that the problem is related to a read/write permissions / "file in use" type of problem that is specifc to network drives in some way.
I have two computers, and my iTunes library is stored on a usb-harddrive connected to a Airport Extreme wireless router.
When I have opened iTunes on computer1, and try to start iTunes on computer2 it says that the Itunes library is locked.
I guess the same thing is happening when FrontRow tries to connect to the iTunes library, while iTunes is open.
Message was edited by: krabbetegne

Front Row is listing particular TV Shows as Movies, even though the "Type" attribute is correctly set to "TV Show" in iTunes.

Here's the whole story:
My friend gave me access to a whole season of one of my favorite TV shows, with all the commericals removed! Lucky me! I imported them into iTunes using File, Add To Library, and at first they all showed up in Movies. I then edited the file info to add episode title, number, season, date, rating - all the metadata - and then iTunes successfully moved the episodes from Movies to TV Shows. HOwever, Front Row is STILL listing these episodes (and ONLY these episodes) under Movies AS WELL AS TV Shows!
I have tried Consolidating the files (no effect), eidting all the "Get Info" data again to force an update (no effect), and I even went so far as to locate the episode files in Finder (they are corectly located under TV Shows, and NOT Movies), and then I manually selected the file, hit "Get Info", and changed the associated application from Quicktime to iTunes (the file extension is MP4 for all these episodes). This also had no effect on the problem.
The files play equally well from either Movies or TV Shows, but that is besides the point. I cannot find documentation on WHERE Front Row stores it's data and/or how I can "force" Front Row to update it's information so it is accurate. I have toggled iTunes open and closed, Shutdown and Restarted the machine and even run Disk Utility to make sure the permissions are all okay - and they are. None of this has any effect on the problem, which persists.
I am at my wits end with this problem. I have loggged a hardware issue with Apple over it, and they are due to phone me tomorrow, but if anyone has a quick and easy solution to this issue that DOESN'T involve deleting and reimporting all my movies, which really shouldn't be necessary, I'd love to have your feedback and assistance. We pay upwards of $1,000 and then some for these confounded machines, they should not require 'work arounds' - applications provided with the OS should be documented and supported!
Thanks for your help!

Doug's script worked, as I thought it might, but I am also continuing to pursue an "official" solution from Apple, because i absolutely HATE it when a company is aware of a problem, but refuses to officially acknowledge it and offer a solution.
The first thing out of the support engineer's mouth after we spoke about the problem, was "I'll escalate this to our applications group, but we really don't support TV Show content other than those you download from the Apple Store, and Front Row is kind of a dead issue now that Lion is out." And I was like, "Huh? What about the hundreds of thousands of people who do NOT upgrade to Lion and who RELY on Front Row as a key component of our media management and usage solution?" He didn't have an answer and I didn't really expect that he would. Apple doesn't give a crap about it's customers, any more than ANY big company does. Once they have your money, the love affair is over. Reading these forums and other online Apple support discussions, so many people had no idea that they would LOSE Front Row by upgrading to Lion. I can't believe that Apple would kill off something that is clearly providing value to so many customers - especially without offering an alternative (i.e., Front Row is dead, but you can use Orchestra Center" (or whatever) to get the same functionality, with these enhancements).
Someone very much smarter than me coined the phrase "Sales makes friends, but Service keeps them!" Definitely not something that Apple is using as an operating paradigm. Apple only loves you if you get on the money wagon and keep buying the new sh*t!

Front Row Freezes and has Glitches with DVDs

I already posted this in another forum, but someone suggested I post it here.
Whenever I start a DVD using Front Row, about 1 in every 5 times the screen will remain black and nothing will happen, and I can't even force quit to get out, I have to do a force shut down. This is infuriating when all I want to do is watch a DVD and I have to restart the whole computer. What could be causing this? When the thing actually DOES play dvds, the screen has glitches, like pink and green random images that resembles when an old Nintendo system is crashing. Please help if you can!! Thanks in advance.

I sure haven't. I must note, also, that it's not just with DVDs. Video files on the hard drive have the problem, as well.
Someone mentioned that the VGA dongle might be the culprit but that doesn't make sense. The computer with an external display works fine until Front Row is used. And, as I stated earlier, it doesn't seem to matter with my situation if I have an external display connected or not.
My personal opinion is that there's a conflict with some third-party codecs on the system. For example, I have installed the Perian components and ffmpeg. Since I have some free time this weekend, I'll be removing these and see if the problems persist.

Front row crashing

For some reason front row just started crashing, it only crashes when i choose 'movies' from the video section. I checked the crash log but it doesnt really give me something that points me to why FR is crashing.
Any ideas?

I have this problem consistently. Front Row running in the background taking up ~%96 of the processor capacity. I can see this through the system monitor widget. However, Front Row does not show up under the Apple --> Force Quit menu. It's like a hidden process? (I didn't know mac's hid their processes). Sometimes I can get back into Front Row and use the "apple-Q" force quit command, and that will bring me back to desktop and everything works fine and the processor capacity is released. I can then even get back into Front Row and it will work just fine until the next unexpected front-row crash.
Unfortunately, sometimes when I am at the desktop and, having noticed that Front Row is crashing in the background, *I cannot get back into Front Row* either by apple remote or "Apple-Esc". And as I said, Front Row does not show up under Apple->ForceQuit. So I am forced to restart the computer.
Note: Front Row crashes at LEAST everyday, about every 3rd time I use it. I haven't confirmed this, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter what type of media has been played under Front Row to cause a crash. I'm kind'a hoping it's a bug that's secretly fixed in the next OS update

Front Row Crashing Computer

This has been an ongoing problem ever since the two Front Row updates ago, which, as you may guess, was a LONG time ago. The problem, as obscure as it may sound, is that whenever Front Row has to scroll the name of the song because it's too long to fit on screen, it freezes upon the flipping animation that happens every 30 seconds. Is there anyway to fix this?

I have this problem consistently. Front Row running in the background taking up ~%96 of the processor capacity. I can see this through the system monitor widget. However, Front Row does not show up under the Apple --> Force Quit menu. It's like a hidden process? (I didn't know mac's hid their processes). Sometimes I can get back into Front Row and use the "apple-Q" force quit command, and that will bring me back to desktop and everything works fine and the processor capacity is released. I can then even get back into Front Row and it will work just fine until the next unexpected front-row crash.
Unfortunately, sometimes when I am at the desktop and, having noticed that Front Row is crashing in the background, *I cannot get back into Front Row* either by apple remote or "Apple-Esc". And as I said, Front Row does not show up under Apple->ForceQuit. So I am forced to restart the computer.
Note: Front Row crashes at LEAST everyday, about every 3rd time I use it. I haven't confirmed this, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter what type of media has been played under Front Row to cause a crash. I'm kind'a hoping it's a bug that's secretly fixed in the next OS update

Front row in Lion 10.7 issue (-70012) and video_ts not playing issue -solved

Hi all,
thought I just post my solution to the front row issues in 10.7. I looked for a solution for days, and when I found it, I thought it would make other peoples live easier if I combine everything in one post.
I actually had a couple of issues:
PROBLEM:
first front row stopped playing VIDEO_TS files in 10.6.
the second issue occurred when I thought upgrading to 10.7 would solve the issue; Front row still couldn't play the VIDEO_TS, because FRONT ROW was gone...
SYMPTOMS:
both issues always showed the same symptoms:
when a dvd-back folder was selected, front row would show a black screen, and then, caused by my frantic pushing the ESC button, front row would give me the dvd player not valid -70012 error.
CAUSE:
so what happened? I chose to buy my MBP 17" with the smallest HDD (yep sorry, was cheap-s-ing). Then later that year, I decided to buy the HDD caddy and switch my internal superdrive for a SSD. I ended up placing the original HDD in the hdd caddy, which I then put in the Superdrive's slot, and I placed the SSD in the slot where the original HDD was residing first. I now had a MBP 17" late 2011, with vertex3 SSD. I forgot, I also put in 16 GB, replacing the 8 GB.
So, when I back-upped all my favorite DVDs as VIDEO_TS files, (no I did not download dvds through usenet), grabbed the popcorn, and started Front Row, the disappointment began. No VIDEO_TS file would play, always the same -70012 error message. So after a lot of internet research I stumbled upon a guy who said: yeah, you have to upgrade to 10.7. After the upgrade my FRONT ROW was gone.
SOLUTIONS:
In 10.6:
As Apple's DVD player is always looking for the internal dvd player as a prerequisite to start, Front Row, which uses Apple's DVD player as video player, will throw up the -70012 error. 'Cause it finds the HDD in the HDD Caddy instead of the SuperDrive. So in 10.6 (and in 10.7 also) you can use the following solution:
(I got this solution partial from http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20070591-263.html)
1: modify the DVDPlayback framework that the DVD Player uses so that it will recognize external drive as a valid DVD playback device. (The HDD Caddy came with an external casing for the SuperDrive)
2: download a hex editor (I used Hexedit 220 from http://hexedit.sourceforge.net/ )
3: Go to the folder /System/Library/Frameworks/ and back up the file "DVDPlayback.framework."
4: Open Hexedit_220 and use it to open the following file:/System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback.
5: Using the editor's find&replace through COMMAND-F, replace "Internal" with the text "External" and save the file. Note that Hexedit also saves a backup automatically.
6: Close the file once saved, and then run a permissions fix on the boot drive using Disk Utility. Then restart the system and you should now be able to play DVDs off the external drive using DVD Player. That is, If you use an external dvd player (which I don't use).
7: I inserted a very small USB stick in the MBP with no data on it, and Front Row and Apple DVD Player accepted this. I could now play my backupped DVDs.
ofcourse, I still wanted to upgrade to 10.7, so here's the solution to 10.7
10.7:
upgrading was a simple click with the mouse, worked like a charm, Office still worked, and some minor updates installed through software.
Front Row however, gone...
I used the steps outlined in http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/21/front-row-for-mac-os-x-lion/ to get Front Row back:
- first get the package from Madhatter: Download the free package installer by MacHatter
- install, or customize the install
- all done.
Then I used the steps from step 3 through 7 outlined above in solution 10.6.
Catch:
So I did not find a solution to fooling the DVD Player / Front Row with the USB stick. So everytime I watch VIDEO_TS in Front Row the USB stick must be inserted. But, the good news, I can still use my remote control for something.
Hope I helped some guys out there with this solution.
Regards,
Johnno

The issue has previously hit Apple TV owners. I think people came to the conclusion that it was a HDMI handshake problem. Basically the process where the device and TV greet each other, make up some rules about communicationg and what their secret key is and so on.
I haven't tried this yet, but my local service center says that basically I can do one of two things:
- Downgrade to 10.7 and then download the 10.7.1 update from Apples website. To do this without having a Mac OS X Lion disc, you can hold down CMD + R when the computer boots to be able to access the recovery partition on newer Macs that come without the OS disc.
or..
- Put something in between the computer and TV. For example, if you're using an amplifier as a part of your home theather set up, this will probably work. The service guy said he has his Mini connected to the amplifier, which in turn is connected to speakers and a projector. The inverted colors still appear, but only once per night (i.e. after the first problem is reset by resetting the link then it's fine).
For now, I'll do my little dance of changing the source on the TV from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2 and then back again to reset the link... But, I'll probably try downgrading in a few days.

Is Front Row multi Region?

I have just got Front Row for my PowerBook and put one of my movie DVD's in and front row played it without asking me what region I would like to choose, As I have lived in the US, the UK and Australia I have DVD's from 3 different regions which is why in the past I have not used iDVD.
Can I start using front row for all my DVD's?
For a heads up I usually watch DVD's through my computer using VLC
Any info would be great.

eurocrazy wrote:
I have just got Front Row for my PowerBook and put one of my movie DVD's in and front row played it without asking me what region I would like to choose, As I have lived in the US, the UK and Australia I have DVD's from 3 different regions which is why in the past I have not used iDVD.
I ripped my relatively few USA and UK out of region DVDs to my hard drive using Mac the Ripper, which removes the region coding. There isn't any point in copying a commercial DVD via a DVD burner, since almost every cheap stand alone DVD Player will play any region without protest. So you only need a ripped region free copy on hard drive to play on the Mac.
Looks like Front Row on Leopard is happy enough playing an in region DVD from the actual DVD. For the ripped Video_TS files of a DVD, I found you had to put the folders into your ~/Movies folder (or make an alias to the (shared) folder they are really in). I believe you can also put the ripped DVD version on an external drive, and again use the alias trick, but haven't tried that as yet.
Still not sure how you persuade Front Row to use AirTunes to send the audio to an external sound system. But VLC doesn't do that either.

Auto-Quit Front Row on exit?

Hi everyone.
Having just received a new MacBook with Leopard, I've been playing around with the new version of Front Row. First off, it's great, runs smoothly and exactly as I want it to. However, I've noticed that Front Row.app uses an awfully big chunk of RAM. This is understandable for when it's active/running - it's a hefty app. The thing I don't like is that after I've exited Front Row, it's still running (as shown in Activity Monitor), still using a big amount of RAM. Is there a way to change the behavior of it, so that when I exit Front Row with the remote it actually quits the Front Row.app process? It's kinda annoying to go into Activity Monitor to quit it manually. Also, the Front Row app icon, now available in Leopard doesn't show it as actively running, so no help there. Does it eventually quit on its own, and I'm just jumping the gun by going to Activity Monitor?
Thanks!
William

Saying it will 'eventually' quit is a little vague. Any idea how long it floats around running in the background for? I have an external drive I use with my MacBook, with aliases that point toward it in my movies folder (so that I can view movies stored on the external drive). The problem is that until Front Row /quits/ I cannot eject the drive. So I have to fire up Activity Monitor and quit Front Row that way. Rather annoying, especially when I just want to eject the drive, close the laptop, and get moving.

Front Row & DVD close captioning

Will Front Row allow use of close captioning for dvds that do not have subtitles?

I tried this with .srt and Quicktime .txt files, and with movies in .m4v and .avi format. I tried them in iTunes, Quicktime Player, and Front Row. In none of them did the subtitles show up by putting them in the same folder. I downloaded what seems to be the SRT import bundle you're referring to from here:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/25631
I've also tried opening the videos in Quicktime Pro and adding the text track, but then I can't seem to toggle it on and off in iTunes or Front Row. If I open it in Quicktime Player, I can toggle subtitles on and off by going to the Movie Properties and toggling the checkbox for the Text Track, but it seems like I should be able to get it to actually recognize that text track as a track for subtitles/CC.
I'm sorry if this is moving a bit away from the original question about DVDs and more into the arena of closed captioning for video files in general; I'll create a new thread if need be.
Greg

Keyboard disabled with Front Row

Since I upgraded to Leopard, the keyboard no longer works when Front Row is open. The only thing I can do with the keyboard is Opt-Cmd-Esc, forcing Front Row to quit. Remote works fine, but keyboard arrows, Cmd-Esc to close, etc. do nothing on the keyboard.
Does anyone know how to fix this?

I have the same problem with my MacPro. It only affects one user. Try adding another user and see if that user sees the same issue. I have not been able to find what it is that is causing the issue with the one user. I have removed preference related to both front row and keyboard without any luck.
Front row was not availabile for the Macpro before Leopard.

Force Front Row To Use Rosetta?

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