I love Front Row. It’s a clean interface which works wonders for watching videos on a Mac. There’s only one limitation - it can only play videos that are in iTunes or in your Movies folder. Luckily, you can easily get around that by created what is called an Alias, a small file which severs as a pointer to a different location. Front Row recognizes Aliases, and will browse to different folders provided the Alias is in the Movies folder.
While you could create an Alias to every potential location, we’re going to make it a little easier by creating an Alias to the /Volumes folder. The /Volumes folder contains every hard drive, disk, or network share mount on your system. By having an Alias to /Volumes, you’ll be able to access anything on your machine.
Creating an Alias to /Volumes can be tricky since OS X hides the folder by default. Thankfully, there is an easy way to get by that.
- Within Finder, hit Shift-Command-Go. This will bring up a location box.
- In that box, type /Volumes and click Go. You will then see the /Volumes folder in your Finder window.
- From here, Command-Option drag the folder to your Movies folder.
Once the Alias is created, just open up Front Row and in the Videos section select Movies. Browse to your newly created /Volumes Alias and let the good times roll.
12 Comments
Interesting article. I imagine Aliases are like links or symbolic links in the *nix world. However, I found your article to be rather difficult to understand because it is rather wordy and they don’t have any pretty pictures to show the more difficult areas. Meaning it is written in an overly-complicated than necessary way.
What areas are confusing? I’ll tweak the article up and include some pictures when I get back from work (10PM EST :-().
Well to me it wasn’t confusing because I know what I am doing, sorry for not being clearer, I meant it can be confusing to those less knowledgable than us. It seemed a little wordy. For something like this, I think using an ordered list would been fine rather than paragraph form.
How’s that Jonathan?
Perfect! That is perfect format and style for a how-to. Easy to follow step-by-step. So how is school?
Would using the Terminal be just as easy?
$ ln -s /Volumes /Path-to-movies-folder/Alias-Name or something similar? i am at wor right now so no mac
No, the terminal doesn’t work since the volumes folder is hidden from the system without modifying some config files. It’s doable but would require a few extra steps.
Did not know that.
I’ve been doing this trick ever since Front Row came out. I just upgraded to iTunes 7 and the associated Front Row upgrade. Now Front Row won’t recognize aliases any more? Anyone else having this problem?
Aliases are working for me. Try repairing permissions.
doh! the aliases were pointing to a server which wasn’t mounted (i think it got me because i always leave the server mounted… and for some reason it just wasn’t at the time i tried it.) Thanks though… I wouldn’t have looked into it further if you didn’t say it worked for you.
is there a way to have front row list the movies by the alias name rather than the file name? there are times this would be more readable. thanks!
Post a Comment