Major Front Row Bug

Hello,
I have a MacBook Pro 2.2 Ghz with a external 24" Display as the main monitor. I started Front Row, went to the DVD menu and had the "loading dvd" thing coming up. I watched my movie for a while and quit FrontRow with the remote control. Then I decided to go back to FrontRow and continiue my movie, but as soon as I hit the DVD menu my screen just went black, no key combination helped but hardware reset... This bug occured already twice.
What can I do? I don't want to loose my data if that happens another few times since I haven't recieved my backup drive.

I had a similar problem as this, and it may be in conjunction with the problems people were having in this thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5666519&#5666519
If turning off the screen saver doesn't work, it might be a minor glitch involving Leopard's new de-interlacing technology. I am going to do some further reading on this to see what can be done to correct it and call Apple if necessary to ask for their recommendations.

Similar Messages

Front Row Bug - Reproducible

I wanted to log a bug somehow but couldn't find an official way to do it. I have a basic 10.5 installation modified only with the video codec pack Perian.
Steps to reproduce:
1) Attach a MiniDVI - DVI connector to an external source (plasma TV here)
2) Close the Macbook lid
3) Turn front row on with the apple remote
4) Watch a movie (using Perian's h.264 decoder here)
5) Stop movie, open lid, disconnect MiniDVI
6) Dock displays, rest of screen is black. Computer is unresponsive to most commands
Fix it suckas.
Much appreciated when you do.

_http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html_
Joe

Front Row black screen bug

I have a weird problem while running Front Row on my PowerBook 17''. Once I run Front Row, an intermittent black screen comes with it. If I don't move my mouse for a few seconds the screen goes out. Notice that I'm using the external DVI connection to an external monitor in Mirror Mode.
Best regards.

Is this what you are seeing...?
Front Row: Photos will not play if nested in another folder or album
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302567

Front Row Garbles up

Ok, computer as described below in my profile...
Transferred everyting from my old Mac to my new Mac. Worked perfectly.
But...
I activate Front Row and it works great... until I start navigating through the menus. It gets garbled up lines in it. Is this a faulty video card? I thought so at first, but found out that my buddy that has a 20" iMac G5 is having the same issues. Totally different card in that system by the way.
So, is it an OSX 10.4.4 issue? You tell me. Whatever it is I don't like it. I love the new iMac, it's a great machine... just need to fix this issue.
No major complaints from me, this is going to be a transition that will take time, but I see it as "growing pains." The end result is obviously going to be a better product.
Good job Apple. Now fix my d@mn machine!
Joe

Just like the rest of you I have this same problem. And I also upgraded the video card too. But not only do I have the problem in Front Row, I have the same annoying issue in iMovie. Has anyone else checked to see whether they are experiencing this "bug" in iMovie as well. I've also discovered that after downloading 10+ widgets my system becomes VERY unstable...multiple programs crash or freeze up, I can't change my desktop picture without the system going haywire, and many other little annoyances. Although this might be due to a number of non-universal programs I have installed. Not sure yet. But I sure hope Apple can get this all worked out in a reasonable amount of time!

Is there a way to open Front Row without the remote?

I wonder, is there some keyboard shortcut that will open front row?
I ask because a while ago I was about to force-quit an application(cmdoptesc), and then I cancelled(esc) that and toggled to another application's window(cmd+tab), etc., all of this using only the keyboard. But because of the application that wasn't working right, things got slow, and after waiting a couple of seconds for the other window to appear... Fron Row just appeared in front of me!!!
I don't know if it was some keyboard shortcut that i accidentally pressed, or just a bug. Does enyone know?

Command + Escape
arrow keys
return
and escape to bail
good luck
-j

What is the best older version of iTunes for Front Row?

Can anyone share some opinions please on which older version of itunes I should download that has the least amount of bugs when using "front row" (I currently have 9.0.3 and Mac OS X 10.5.8)? . Also, should I download the regular version or the 64-bit version? What's the difference/advantage between the two?
Many-many thanks in advance.

I am right up there with iTunes biggest proponents, and try and to recruit anyone who will listen...
I've got about 75 "complete season" Television DVDs, and it was really time consuming to decide which series and episode I wanted to watch by pulling out a box, reading each episode summary that came with the DVD, then take it out of the box, insert it, view it, put it back etc. etc....all for one episode!
Then I heard about adding video files to iTunes and viewing them via Front Row (or iTunes)...couldn't wait to try it. Was totally won over by Front Row's little opening fanfare and the look of the table of contents/episode screen etc. Every feature worked fine.
Since downloading 9.0.3 (from either 9.0 or 9.1) however, I inherited that scrolling issue were it skips and jumps to the last TV Show played or occasionally a random episode, and keeps reverting to that one as well. With my previous version, that scrolling issue appeared, but only several times in about a 3 month daily viewing period then stopped doing that altogether. With that version of iTunes, it seemed to stop after I held the up and down buttons on the remote and let it rapidly scroll up and down (from top to bottom) throughout that particular series. That doesn't work now, and even scrolling up and down/back and fourth, full speed ahead, I can see it semi-pause for a split second on a specific episode. This now became constant problem.
Now a newer problem. I had some misc. TV shows that were catalogued in iTunes as Misc., which front row correctly displayed as such and were properly filed in it's own iTunes folder. I tried to rename that folder, and since then, the iTunes window displays the new name correctly, but Front Row doesn't. I tried dragging that folder to the desktop, creating a new one in the iTunes folder, then dragging those desktop files (sans folder) into the new one and it's still back to square one! I've got about 840 TV shows, with 145 GB of free space remaining.
Again, thanks all for your help.

Front Row movie trailers -- not connected to internet message?

I'm new to Front Row, even though it's been on my laptop for a while! Anyway, when I click on Movie Trailers, I get a message saying I'm not connected to the internet, even though I am (via Airport). I looked at Network Diagnostics as both the message and Apple Support site suggested, and everything is reported as fine (as I knew it would be; I can get to the internet with no problem). The only other thing I found in Support was for machines with more than 1 Ethernet port, which I don't have.
Is there something special I need to do to get Front Row to see I'm connected to the internet? Thanks for any suggestions!

I believe you've encountered a bug with Front Row. If you can, try plugging in an Ethernet cable even if it's not actually connected to the Internet itself. Sometimes Front Row looks only for an Internet connection through the Ethernet port even if the port, itself, is not connected to the the Internet. I think the trailers will play through the AirPort connection anyway...
-Doug

Front Row - Lid Closed - Blank Videos (but with audio)

I hooked my computer up to my TV last night to watch some videos through front row (stupid quicktime and the pro lockout on full screen - talk about penny pinching from Apple!). Front row worked fine if I set it up so that the TV mirrored my laptop display. However, if I tried to run the laptop in lid closed mode with the TV as my main/only monitor everything would work except for the videos. They would be black while retaining the audio. For example, the little preview movies shown in the selection menu were black as was the movie when you played it.
Is this a known bug? Is there a fix? (Obviously I can run it more or less similarly with mirroring and my main screen dimmed as I did.)

i'm having the same issue. The video i tried was purchased from the iTunes music store. i see no preview of the video and no video is played on screen however audio is present. the same problem also occurs when trying to watch a movie trailer via movie trailer front row interface. All Front Row graphics are seen, only video is a problem. I can open and play back the video without problems in Quicktime Pro. (fullscreen)
The video output is 1280x720 sent to a samsung tv using a built in profile with overscan disabled.
Macbook (white) Mac OS X (10.4.6) 2.0Ghz Core Duo - 2GB RAM

Front Row on an External Display

**Note that this is for Leopard's Front Row and only may not apply to Tiger's**
Here's an explanation of the bugs/irksomes now facing Front Row
1. The screensaver option can be buggy so go to preferences within Front Row to disable it.
2. Whatever screen you use front row on, the other will be black.
3. Front Row does not play video in mirroring mode, period.
4. Front Row, when opened, will display on whatever monitor is set as your primary display at that time.
5. Even after exiting it, if you check it the activity monitor it will still run in the background for 30 minutes (not sure on that time frame).
6. If you open it up again before it is shutdown, it will try to display on whatever was set as the primary display when it was first launched.
Okay, now that you understand that, here is somethings to keep in mind
-When you initially open it, the settings get stuck, so if you opened it with the wrong display set as your primary monitor, just quit it in the activity monitor, switch the main monitor in your display system preferences, and then reopen it.
-You can trick it to display on your secondary display by enabling mirror-mode, opening front row, exiting front row (not quiting), disabling mirror mode, and lastly reopening front row. Effectively, it gets stuck to display on the external display and does so once you turn mirroring off. This isn't even remotely elegant but is my preferred method.
-If you have your external display connected while your computer is asleep, pressing a button on your remote will automatically wake it and use the external display as your primary/only monitor. This means that Front Row will display on your TV very easily if you put your computer to sleep then wake it with the remote BUT you must always be mindful that if you had opened it recently, you may have to quit it first.
The only last suggestion I have is that if you want quick and easy access to quitting front row, you can create an applescript to quit it with this
tell application "Front Row" to quit
If anyone knows how to change primary displays using applescripts please post as ideally a script could be created that would just make sure Front Row was quit, switch displays, then would open it streamlining the entire process.
Well really ideally apple would make Front Row a little more dynamic with the option to display on the external display and smart enough to know which one that is but this problem existed in the last version too and they never fixed it then so....

Well,just putting the display in sleep mode won't work as, for some reason I don't understand, sleeping the display turns off the external monitor.
Thinking a little more clearly now, the method of sleeping the computer only works for the portable Macs as the lid must be down while it wakes up for it to work.

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 on Snow Leopard has audio out of sync on movies and TV shows and some movies wont show images.

I have an iMac Core Duo 2GHz (yes, first Intel iMac). I have Snow Leopard v10.6.8 (latest/last MacOS version I could load) with the most recent Security Update (2013-003).
I have two issues with Front Row:
• Some of the movie files will not show the images, but I can hear the audio.
• On other movies and TV shows they start fine, but within a few minutes the audio is out of sync with the images, running about 3-5 seconds ahead... Looks like a bad dub of a Japanese movie from the 60s.
Now, I know it's related to Front Row, because when I jump over to iTunes and start the same movie or TV show it begins where I left off in Front Row, but images are fine and audio is suddenly in-sync.
However, with Snow Leopard being 2 major upgrades back - 3 if you count the upcoming Mavericks release - I doubt this registers as a "brouhaha" on Apple's radar screens. Then, again, maybe the spirit of Steve won't tolerate this Microsoft-like quirk, even if my iMac is still chugging along after 7 years and multiple MacOS X upgrades & updates...

I think I found my answer... or culprit. It has to do with Snow Leopard, and my iMac Core Duo, being the last of the dying breed of 32-bit systems, and that iTunes v11.x is 64-bit (heavily, at least)...
Guess I need to break down and replace my 7 year old iMac, even though it still works beautifully (otherwise).

Front Row shuts down when ever I click on the movies button

I have read through the majority of issues on the DQ board. My problem differs as I can use iTunes, DVD, and iPhoto through Front Row but when ever I select Movies it just closes unexpected and I am back to the desktop.
Have rebooted, no go. I only have 2 movie files (less that 50megs each), no go. I am in the admin account.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
jz

Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
Can you create a new use with the Accounts System Preferences, log out and log in as the new user? Do they encounter the same trouble? (With or without any movies in the new "Movies" folder? If they do encounter the same issue, then you have a system-wide or hardware problem. (It's doubtful it's a hardware problem.) Is your Front Row up-to-date? The current version is 1.3. Is your QuickTime up-to-date? The current version is 7.1.6. Since videos are played through the QuickTime Player (even if they live in iTunes), it's important that both Front Row and QuickTime are up-to-date.
-Doug

Places is not shown in front row

when I go to front row,it shows that there is no photo in this album, while I have photos linked to google maps in iPhoto!
where is the bug?

I don't even see "Places" anywhere inside Front Row's "Photos" module. Which version of Mac OS X, Front Row, QuickTime and iPhoto are you using?
-Doug

Playlists not showing up in folders in Front Row 1.2.1

Just installed the Front Row update on my G5 iMac and I was psyched because I would now be able to see shared music in the Front Row interface. However, I was dismayed to find that no playlists showed up if those playlists were located in playlist folders in iTunes on the remote machine. If you navigate down to a folder that contains playlists and open it, all you see is the long list of files in every playlist that exists in that folder.
This is crazy and makes Front Row basically unusable for anyone who has playlists located in folders. I make playlists and organize them because I don't want a huge long list of songs and playlists.
Am I missing something obvious here or is this a bug?
PowerMac G5 Dual 1.8ghz 2gb RAM Mac OS X (10.4.5) - iMac G5 - TiBook 550 - PowerCenter Pro - Mac SE 30

Same here. Just unpacked my new iMac Core Duo and installed all of the updates. No music loaded on the iMac yet, but I'm sharing the library from my PowerBook and all of the playlist folders in that library are shown in the same fashion as described above.

Front Row on mac mini: We need some fixes

Been having fun playing with my mac mini and trying it out as a home media center, to network and play all my shared media that's on my iMac G5 and enjoy it on my 32" LCD TV and stereo system.
There are three major glitches that keep this from working perfectly, and hopefully Apple will have a fix for these soon:
1. When you want to view your shared pics as a slideshow, Front Row is not able to remember and use the music settings that you have assigned to your albums in iPhoto. It can only use music for the slideshows that originates on the mini. There is no choosing from the Shared Music in the slideshow preferences, and therefore no option to, like on an iPod, to have your slideshow music setting set to "From iPhoto".
2. Front Row keeps insisiting and changing even saved settings for slideshow playaback, always reverting back to using Jesu Joy...from the Sample Music folder, and displaying images with the Ken Burns effect. I have tried changing these setting on both computers's iPhoto settings, and yet Front Row resets them, if not immediately, upon the next opening.
3. I cannot get any movie that I did not purchase off of iTunes to play through the networked connection. It seems that it cannot stream anything much longer or bigger than an iPod sized music video or movie trailer. I couldn't even get the TV show episodes I have in iTunes to work. Trying to play a full length movie resulted in FrontRow hanging forever and me having to Force Quit or restart. Many of the full length movies I had ripped from DVDs to mp4s I did at a larger size than the 320 iPod screen size, so that when I played them back on a large display they would look better. These movies are formatted right and do play in iTunes as well as on my iPod, and from my iPod to TV with the AV cables, but not through the wireless networked mac mini.
If we can get these things straightened out, it is a pretty great home media device.

Jim,
Isn't Front Row awesome and full of promise! I just needed a new mini and got this to play with in the mix. Looks like I need two mini since this one is going under the TV.
Now to your glitches. Remember front row is simply an agent that listens for remote commands and sends them to other applications to do the heavy lifting/dirty work.
1. I think this is really a problem with the version of iPhoto that has the photos. I'm not a guru of iPhoto, but I know of no way to change the defaults for a new slideshow. All the shows I create (either in iPhoto or via front row requesting a slide show on the fly) initially default to Automatic Ken Burns and the Jesu.... soundtrack ( a great piece of music no doubt, but woefully overplayed at the moment for my tastes.) I have no problems once I go into iPhoto and set the slide show prefernces the way I like and quit/re-start iPhoto. I don't know if there is another way to save the settings for a slide show, but quitting seems to do the trick for me.
2. I'm not catching anything new here. Are you sure your settings were saved - (i.e. could you start iPhoto on "source" computer and play the slide show immediately and get the music and settings you changed?) Sorry to question you but I just can't think anything else here. Front row is simply asking iTunes (either locally or remotely) to play the show or create one if it does not exist. Perhaps the way it is asking is different for you - I have a weird mix of software levels (iPhoto 5 on my remote mac and iPhoto 6 on my mini) - but I cannot reproduce the symptom you mentioned to try to see what happened.
3. This could be a network issue (or a too much stuff to fit in the sock.) What is the data rate for one of the movies that causes you issues? Is that rate more than your network will allow? Front Row doesn't seem to be that graceful at the moment when network pauses or fails. It will wait a long time to time out the operation and I get to watch that circular throbber a lot. Open up the Activity Monitor (it's in Applications / Utilities folder). Play the movie locally from a hard disk. Look at the Disk Activity tab at the bottom. It will give you an idea of how much data needs to be read from disk to play the movie. Then change to the network tab. Go to the other computer and play the movie. Return to the first computer and see how much data manages to get sent. (It's best to quit all other applications when measuring - this tool shows all activity on the mac - not just the movie...) I have a lot of movies that have way too much data to send wirelessly. I'm going to upgrade my home switch to gigabit and wire things to that to serve my needs.
Good luck - let me know if I misunderstood anything - but I'm guessing front row already does what you want and there are some workarounds or other issues of learning how to set things up to give you that pretty great home media device you want.

Major Front Row Bug

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