Front Row & AVI?

Hey everyone
I have a bunch of AVI files that i would like to use with front row... i know that i can't play th avi files with quicktime, so i play them with vlc... is there any way to make it so that vlc player plays the avi files in front row or is there a plug-in for quicktime where i can play avi files on front row? thanks!

AVI's can contain various codecs for both audio and video. The most common video codec is Xvid or Divx.
There is an open source Quicktime component for Xvid for both Intel/PPC macs, download the AviImporter preview.
Support for the AC3 audio codec can be found here for PPC/Intel.
Both are installed by following the included documentation in the downloads (drop to /Library/Quicktime).
Some Avi's may still not play due to other video/audio codecs. Thus far I have only found a few that I have that are using an msmpg4 video codec that I could not get to play.
Another option is the DivX Quicktime Component, but I have not had any experience with it.
Mac Mini (Intel) Mac OS X (10.4.6)

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No sound from playing avi files in front row.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can play my avi files from front row when I put them into the movies folder...however, the music just won't play!!!~~~~~~
is anyone else having this problem?
anyone with a solution?
please please help!!!!

I'm assuming these are Divx movies? Have you installed the latest AC3 codec, this worked for me:
You need a file called "AC3 Codec.component"
Do a search and you can find it to download, and try that. This got my audio working in Front Row on my MacBook Pro
You can download it here:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Audio/AC3-Codec.shtml

How can I read several avi files in single DVD with FRONT ROW?

Hi!
Is it possible to make Front Row read several movie files in a single DVD?
I burned 6/7 avi files in each DVD, but Front Row can't even read the DVD itself!
Thanks!

Hi Imcaet
It sounds as though you have made a Data DVD rather than a Movie DVD. Front Row can only read Movie DVDs. All Data must be in iTunes, or in on of the directories it looks in, such as "Movies" in your home directory.
If you need to combine the movies, you will need something like QuickTime Pro 7, which can be purchased from the Apple website. You need to Select All the movie you wish to Append, Copy, go to the End of the movie you wish to Append to, and Paste. You can then save/export the movie in full.

Itunes / Front Row mp4 and avi and xvid

Hello.
I have started collecting and moving my videos to my macbook.
From my linux/windows days I have avi xvid/divx files.
I have divx player installed on my mac and those files play fine if I click on them.
They also will play if I put them in my movie folder and use front row.
If I try to move avi and xvid to itunes. They will not import.
I assume this is the case becuase itunes is only allowing files into itunes lib that will sync and play on a vid ipod?
However with the move to appleTV and such there are those that are going to want a HQ video that maynot sync on ipod.
Basicly, I just need to know what format I need to start experimenting as far as size/quality ratio so that I can move my vids to that format.
Thanks for your help.
T

If I try to move avi and xvid to itunes. They will not import.
I assume this is the case becuase itunes is only allowing files into itunes lib that will sync and play on a vid ipod?
Close... Quicktime has to be able to support the formats for them to be accepted into iTunes.

Black screen when trying to playback AVI filed in Front Row

Hi,
I just installed PERIAN for playing AVI files in QuickTime. QuickTime plays AVI files just fine but when trying do play same movie in Front Row I just get black screen and no sound. I guess playback is working as I can do fast forward etc, but there is no picture and no sound.
My system is Intel MBP C2D 2.0Ghz using OS X 10.4.10.
Any help?
Message was edited by: PrimozJume

upgrade to 10.4.11 solved the problem.

Playing .avi files in Front Row has stopped

Hi,
I've had my iMac for about 3.5yrs and Front Row has always read .mp4, .m4v and .avi files with no problems (providing i navigate to /Movies/Movies Folder, not /TV Shows because that only reads .mp4 files the same as iTunes & Apple TV), up until a couple of days ago. When i navigate to an .avi file now it plays the file, has the correct time length indicated but all have no sound and black screens.
Is anyone aware of any updates that could've stopped this? how it was casued or know how to get around it?
Thanks.
TG

What version of OS X are you running? Front Row was withdrawn with the advent of Lion.

Playing AVI files in Front Row

Hi, is there anyway I can play avi files in front row without having to convert them to .mov? I could not find any avi plugins for quicktime.

,avi is a container, like .mov, which can contain any number of different codecs.
I would suggest that you download Perian
http://perian.org/
which converts most codecs to something Quicktime can play.
Whether you can then play them in Front Row is another matter - to be honest I am not sure.

How to make front row remember playback position of avi files?

Hi,
Is there a way to make front row remember the last playback position of an avi file?
It can be frustrating having to forward to the last platback position when resuming viewing a media file.
nj

If you load the file into iTunes then Front Row will then remember its last playback position.
Not ideal I know, but it appears to be the only workaround currently.

Getting avi, mpeg and quicktime movies to play in front row

Having located the movies folder - I have created alias's for my movie folders on my external hard drive. However some of the these movies play perfectly well and some do not.
Also when I drag an mpeg movie into the folder to play in Front row - the sound comes through fine but without any picture.
Any help would be appreciated.
cheers

It is all about the codecs used in within the movie files, quite often even though files are named .avi or .mpg they are not of the same format as the codecs used to rip the files are different.
Alas there are hundreds of variations so therefore your best bet is to get add ons like Perian or Flip4Mac which add various codecs to Quicktime.

Front Row - Mac Mini - and PowerBook G4, Mac-Mini Multi Media centre.

I will be purchasing a HDTV is the near future and would like to buy a Mac Mini to complement it. ( then sell my DVD player )
The big question are:
-Can I ( using Front Row ) stream AVI data (film) from my PB G4 to my Mac-Mini and watch the content on my new HDTV. ( over AirPort )
-Do I need to buy a new PB that also has Front Row ? ( I hope not )
-What type of video data can I stream ? (iTunes and iPhoto I already know about)
-What about HD DVD's when they come out. Is the drive in the Mac-Mini HD DVD compatible ?( I don't think so )
Please - If you have any other relevant points or question's about the Mac-Mini usage as a multi media centre, Post them here.
15" PB G4 SD 1.5 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

I just tried a AVI film and it work's with QT,
although a mpg film did not.
Now that I think about it, I tried a mpg plug-in for
QT and was disappointed.
Has anyone had any success with such a plug-in ?
Another Question:
Must then this AVI data reside in iTunes for
Front-Row to "see" it ? How does this work ?
I guess that when a Blue-Ray drive is added to Apple
products that a HD DVD will not play, or will it play
it but only burn Blue-Ray ?
When shopping for a HDTV I asked about the difference
in Blue-Ray and HD and he told me that the TV will
play both versions.
I hope that the drive will also play both, although
the way I know Apple it will be Blue-Ray only. (
at-least in the beginning ) Remember DVD-R
i would not worry about the blu-ray - HD-DVD thing right now. too much still in the air. once they realize consumers are too un-techie to figure it out and just continue to buy DVD's their will be a standard plus their is already other formats being developed. then if you talking about movies and such my guess is downloaded content is the way apple will go with an itunes movie store but thats my guess.
but yes, HDTV's will play either, its the player. I have a 61" samsung 720p DLP and my new mac mini looks good on it at 1280x720. front row is great. I also watched a ton of HD trailers from quicktime's website and they were amazing.
and from what i have seen from front row it only shows content that is in itunes or iphoto not random folders but i could be wrong, still palying around with it.

Why won't Front Row play movies located in my iPhoto Library?

I currently have a little over 300 short movies from my digital cameras. I keep them in subfolders located at /Users/shared/Shared Movies/digital camera movies/ and Front Row plays them just fine under each user account since each user has an alias to /Users/shared/Shared Movies/ located in their "movies" folder within their home folder.
Recently a buddy convinced me to import my short digicam movies into iPhoto as an easier way to organize the short .mov and .avi files. I have over 14K image files in my library so I liked the idea of browsing my video shorts using iPhoto. I created a smart album in iPhoto for all file names ending with .avi or .mov and that works great to quickly locate the relatively few video files in the sea of digital stills.
BUT... WHY won't Front Row locate or play the movies that are located inside of iPhoto's Library? Did they just forget this functionality? Front Row's Video player displays Video Podcasts located in iTunes why wouldn't there also be an automagic category that appears in Front Row for movies located in your iPhoto Library?!
Front Row chokes if I attempt to play the smart "movies" album I created in iPhoto. It just keeps spinning the little "train tracks" progress thingy and never shows a movie. I finally just hit the menu button on the remote to "back out" of that selection.
The other work around I tried to play these movies located in iPhoto was a smart folder located at /Users/shared/Shared Movies/ that displays filenames that contain .mov and .avi located in my iPhoto library folder. This doesn't work. Front Row's Video player will not display the movies found by a smart folder the same way it does for an alias to a folder or file.
I don't want to keep duplicate copies of these movie files on my HD. I'll have to keep them located outside of iPhoto so I can enjoy browsing and watching them "on demand" using Front Row.
What is the fix? Work around?

Thanks for the suggestion but that isn't an option. Think about how iPhoto stores images and movies you import into the photo library. It will import files originally located in one folder and scatter them by storing all the files in hundreds of folders and subfolders based on date. Originally I had my movies in my home movie folder and even used an alias to the shared movies. That all works fine and it isn't the issue. The issue is when you try to use the only tool Apple provides to organize your digital images, both still and moving pictures. Once you import your movies into the iPhoto Library they become invisible to Front Row's video player.
Once iPhoto imports my 300+ files and scatters them into hundreds of subfolders based on the date -how in the world would you even begin to maintain aliases in a folder that point to these files. That is NOT an option, who would do that?! That is why I decided to try the smart folder since it would dynamically locate all the files with .mov and .avi in the file name located within the iPhoto library. Good idea but Front Row will not play these files listed in the result set of a smart folder. It will follow an alias but not play the contents of a smart folder.
Front Row should handle movie files within the iPhoto library the same way it deals with videos within the iTunes library. Poor design, oversight, bug, whatever -it should be fixed. There should be an automatic category that appears under the Front Row video player for "Movies in iPhoto" and if you have no movies in your library it displays something like it does when you have no video podcasts, or no TV shows, or no music videos in iTunes. Come on, how many users have those items vs. an iPhoto library with movies from their digital cameras? I bet more users have movies from their digital cameras that currently drop through a gaping hole in the design of Front Row if they use iPhoto to manage their digicam movie files.

Front Row Photos won't play digital camera videos

Hi,
Firstly, I'm pretty new to Macs but have been finding my feet with most of my new toy's functionality. I've encountered one problem that I can't seem to find an answer to and was hoping someone here would be able to help.
I've used iPhoto to import all of my old photos/videos from my digital camera and have arranged these into a mixture of events and smart-folders. When viewing these via the Photos menu in Front Row, the automatic slideshows play back all my photos just fine, but any videos that were taken at the same time are just shown as a black screen. When I say videos, I mean little video clips that were taken using the digital-camera (640x480 and 30fps).
A few other bits of info that may help with this;
- The videos play fine in iPhoto.
- The black screen appears for the same duration that photos are shown, rather than the length of the video.
- I created a Movies smart-folder, if I hover the selection over this item within Front Row, I'm shown a slideshow of the initial frame of the videos contained within.
- The camera is a Canon Powershot A700 which stores videos as AVIs using the MJPEG format.
Am I trying to do something silly? Should the Photos section of Front Row not be used for video playback? Its a shame if that is the case, as they're memories of that event.
However, the fact that Front Row shows the black screen where the video should be gives me the impression that it is attempting to play it. Otherwise I would expect it to ignore all non-image file formats.
Any help with this would be hugely appreciated.
Cheers,
Ian

Hi,
With a bit of additional searching I seem to have found an answer to my question. Unfortunately it's not the answer I wanted and this seems to be a known issue. The post I found that describes this is here;
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1380562&tstart=0
I'll be raising it in the feedback form.
Cheers,
Ian
Message was edited by: Ecnarfi
URL Corrected
Message was edited by: Ecnarfi

Remove certain movies from Front Row

Hi guys!
I appreciate any advice or guidance on the issue; thank you in advance.
I have my movies in iTunes; they play fine in FR. A good chunk of them have terrible resolution from being compressed over and over with bad setting choices, mainly digitized vhs footage from home movies. Anyways, these movies look pretty bad.
Luckily, I have the originals on a external hd. They are mostly .avi and are in a better quality. I've realized I can just bring these into my "movies" folder, and they work fine, thanks to Perian. I do not do this though because I don't want to occupy space on my main hd, so I just make aliases and bring them into the "movies" folder.
Now, this is okay with me, but I'm a picky guy, and I like my style...
I want to change the metadata so that I can show "artwork" rather that a frame from the movie, plus have a description etc. On a side note if anyone knows of a better way then I am doing it, I am all ears!
So, I open the movies in Quicktime, and save as a reference movie. I then bring the reference movie into MetaX (which lets me add artwork, etc...) Then I can just pop those into iTunes.
Now, this is where it gets tricky/weird. I realize that:
1. I can drop these files in Itunes.
2. This takes up space on my main hd (which I do not want if I do not have to)
3. I now have duplicates (a low rez and a good quality version)
4. Syncing my iPod will bring the reference moves along "for the ride"
ok, so I can just choose which movies to sync to my ipod by checking which movies I want in the setting menu, so no worry about the reference files coming with.
I was wondering is there a way to make an alias of the reference file so that it doesn't take up any space on my main hd?
Irregardless of that situation, I am still stuck with 2 versions of my movies in iTunes.
I want the poorer quality movies on my iPod and iTunes, but only my good quality movies in Front Row. Is there a way to remove the poor quality moves from Front Row while still keeping them in iTunes?
Okay, one last question, which probably should have been the first one. What is the difference between a reference movie and an alias, outside of being able to change meta data? Is a reference movie the equivalent to the "box" that a dvd comes in? You know, it has some pictures on it, cast, description etc...?
If I bring a reference file onto my iPod, will it bring the original (good quality) movie instead? Or have I now got some sort of super awesome compressed version of the movie without any quality loss (or is this some sort of fantastic dream)?
Thank you for any advice. I'm sorry that this is a little long-winded.
I expect someone to replay with "No." as the answer. LOL
Thanks everybody,
Ethan

You're kind of on your way with the solution.
I would like to have posters for my good quality film in itunes+FR, but not on my ipod.
I want the low quality ones on my ipod, but not in my front row.
I've come up with a semi-solution so far.
I've brought the good ones into itunes, with the "copy files to itunes music folder" unchecked. I changed all the info in itunes, and posters etc.... Then I marked all of my low rez movies as tv shows, in a show called "movies"
it is not an ideal solution, but what I am really after is having a "clean" look in itunes when you choose "movies". This might be as close as I can get.
I would prefer something better if at all possible. But I can live with this if I have to. My main concern is that my "tv shows" folder is overflowing with shows. Luckily, they are grouped together by show, and not just in random order.
One thing that would really help, I do not know if this is possible. This would be the ideal solution: if you could create a "show name" folder in the "movies"tab (in itunes/FR)(not to be confused w/ the "movies" in finder) as you can in the "tv shows" tab in itunes.
I've found that because front row has a lack of preferences, and itunes's preferences do not give you enough control; this just turns into a mess.
iLife should be simple, hence the "i" in iLife. LOL
Ethan

Front row plays dvd video but no sound

I tried several dvds in front row and I can't get any sound from them. I can play avi type movies, music and on but I get no sound from dvd's. I can play them on dvd player and get sound but not front row. been running into alot of quirks since the leopard upgrade. hope they patch it soon.

try to isolate the issue to front row by playing it in dvd player. you may get an error message saying that dvd player cannot run because it is being used by another program in which case you have to go to applications/utilities/activity monitor.app find the front row process and control-click quit process or highlight click quit in the upper left hand corner of activity monitor then select quit. run the dvd in dvd player.app and see if it repeats the problem. if not then most likely it's a front row issue. if it happens again try another dvd player software. if you find that it happens on both dvd player.app and front row but not a third then it would most likely be be a dvd player.app issue in which you locate the plist file in library/preferences/ quit out both front row and dvd player.app to ensure it doesn't recreate a duplicate plist file then move the original to trash then open dvd player.app and try again. if all of this fails and it seems hopeless before going to a fresh install or archive and install I recommend update install. I have used this to fix what seemed to be broken and incurable apps on several macs now with success. but try the other stuff first to save you some time if possible. as of now all of my apps other than those non-compatible with Leopard are functioning just fine with the occasional bump in the road. Fixes are necessary as there are quite a few needed but I ran into the same thing with Tiger when it first came out and Tiger was a great OS.

Front Row Video Conversion

Most of the video files I have I play with VLC beacuse quicktime will not play them. They are avi files. I was wondering if there was some program out there that would convert these files to mp4 or something quicktime can read so ic an play them in front row.
OR if there is a way to change the default player of front row that would be great. VLC is more versatile than quicktime. It will play quicktime files but not the other way around. Thanks!!
Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.9) brand spankin new

You're welcome. The current version of Front Row will only play on the "main" screen. You can choose to "mirror" both displays and then you'll see the same thing on both your built-in screen and the TV or other display. When Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is released later this year, it will include Front Row for everyone. I would send Apple some Mac OS X feedback and let them know you'd like to have an option to select the display screen for Front Row.
-Doug

Front Row & AVI?

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