How to open an alias of a VideoTs folder by DVDPlayer

Question

Hello,
Now that i have a 1TByte harddisk i have put some of my DVD's on the harddisk using Mactheripper.
Now i need an easy way to play a DVD.
My idea is to have a folder in the Dock with aliases to the different VideoTs folder.
I know that it is possible within DVDPlayer to open a VideoTS folder.
So i thought that i could have a prefered application to open a folder instead of the Finder. Well that is not possible.
Does anyone have an idea to make some kind of list of aliases of VideoTS in the Dock so i can easily open one of the DVD i have put on my harddisk ?
Thanks
Jitse

Answer 1

You might give it a shot with Automator. There's a thread about using Automator for opening the VIDEO_TS folders.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4208371
Summarized, the workflow to create in Automator was:
1. Finder's "Get Specified Finder Items" and choose a VIDEO_TS folder.
2. Finder's "Open Finder Items" and choose DVD Player.
That's it. Be sure to choose to save it as an application instead of a workflow so you can just double-click to open it in the Finder, or simply select it from a folder in the Dock. As an application, it won't open Automator and can run by itself. Just name it as the movie title.
They duplicated the workflow and changed the action to have a different VIDEO_TS folder, and this gave them one for each movie. The Automator files are very small, so you don't have to worry about taking up much more space. About four of them makes a megabyte (MB), so you would have to have over four thousand to make a GB. They're about 248KB compared to approximately 44KB for an alias.
Anyways, you can also modify the workflow and then save it as a Finder plug-in so you could simply right-click (or Control-click) a VIDEO_TS folder in the Finder. In this case, you would only need one instead of multiple copies. You would need to delete the first action in the workflow so you have only the "Open Finder Items" action left, then choose "Save As Plug-in..." from Automator's File menu. Probably name it something like "Play VIDEO_TS Folder", or some such.
So, say you have a folder of the movies in the Dock. Click on that so a Finder window opens, then just right-click on the movie in the window and choose to play it. You can Control-click or use the action button in a Finder window's toolbar (it has a gear on it). They all provide the same contextual menu for the item you have selected.
Though, to be able to do it with one click from a folder in the Dock, the first way with individual files is the way to do it.