Front Row 2 Customization

[curiousfool]

I'd like to add two bits of functionality to Front Row running on my Mac Mini home theater system. I've found similar things addressed but can't find any answers on my specific questions. Any help in determining whether this is even possible would be great:

First, I'd like to add an additional submenu when clicking on "Genre" in the Music section, a submenu for "Grouping". I've divided my music into subgenres to make my library easier to navigate in iTunes (which I've placed in the "Grouping" section of track info). I'd like to be able to use this when in Front Row as well, so I'd click on a Genre and instead of getting a long list of artists, I'd get a subgenre menu and then by clicking on that I'd get only the albums in that group.

Secondly, I noticed that another site posted a hack for running Firefox on an AppleTV. Would the same hack work so I could run Firefox from within Front Row? I guess the question is "are Front Row and AppleTV built similarly or are were they developed completely independently?" While I'm at it, anyone try running AppleTV plug-ins in FrontRow?

Okay, that's it. Sorry for the long message. Does anyone else have these same frustrations with FR or is it just me?

 

[curiousfool]

It's not the most elegant solution, but after quite alot of digging, here's what I've ended up doing in case someone else has this same issue:

I've installed CouchSurfer for Front Row (http://atvflash.com/couchsurfer.php) to browse the web. It's a clunky web browser made more annoying by FR's inability to accept keyboard input. But it works for general web browsing. By bookmarking sites and avoiding input-heavy sites, it works okay for living room surfing. It also appears to handle various flavors of flash media just fine.

I never was able to find any information on going under the hood of the Front Row Music appliance to possibly add submenus. This is annoying since there seem to be workarounds in the Movies appliance for making subgenres (there's a thread on here that deals with this). I've just had to create smart playlists to handle subgenres.

As I said, these solutions aren't ideal, but they work. If anyone has better ideas for accomplishing these tasks, I'd love to hear them.