Not listing iTunes Movies in FrontRow?

[plinden]

Let me explain my situation. I recently bought a MacMini that's sitting under my TV as a media server. I've moved all our iTunes music and TV shows over to it.

I've also put all our ripped movies under ~/Movies, because I want to organize them rather than have them in one big list. So I have e.g. subdirectories Foreign, Lord of the Rings, Kids, etc. In FrontRow, and these show up nicely as a small list of folders rather than one big list of all the movies (more than 10 or so in the list gets unusable).

However, to share these to my other Macs, e.g. I might want to watch The Two Towers on my iMac while my daughters are watching The Little Mermaid, I need to put these in iTunes (btw, I know how to add to the iTunes library without copying the original with drag-option-release, and that's not the question I'm asking). But if I do that, movies are listed twice in FrontRow on the Mini, from iTunes and in the Movies folders, thus defeating the purpose of organizing them into folders.

I can of course connect to the Mini from the Mac and go directly to the Movies folder, but I'm looking for a solution that my wife is willing to use - it was hard enough to get her to start using FrontRow on the TV, and if I can use FrontRow to get shared Movies from the Mini, it's one less thing for her to learn.

So, does anyone know of a way of omitting iTunes Movies from FrontRow on the Mini?

 

[SilentPanda]

Is it possible to put an alias to the Mac Mini's movie folder in the iMac's movie folder? Probably not I guess but that's all I got for ya. I guess it's also kind of the reverse of what you're asking.

 

[plinden]

I've tried dragging the Movies folders to iTunes but that doesn't work. It doesn't import anything. The files have to be imported.

I've also tried setting the a movie's "album" setting from Get Info but it doesn't affect how it is organized in iTunes. As far as I can tell, the Movies listing is flat in iTunes and can't be organized like music albums and TV shows.

If only Movies could be folder'ized like albums and TV Shows, I could use iTunes and move everything out of ~/Movies ...

 

[bmcgonag]

I've tried dragging the Movies folders to iTunes but that doesn't work. It doesn't import anything. The files have to be imported.

I've also tried setting the a movie's "album" setting from Get Info but it doesn't affect how it is organized in iTunes. As far as I can tell, the Movies listing is flat in iTunes and can't be organized like music albums and TV shows.

If only Movies could be folder'ized like albums and TV Shows, I could use iTunes and move everything out of ~/Movies ...

Actually I have all my movies on an external drive attached to my iMac. I watch them from my MBP attached to my TV.

I turned on Personal Folder Sharing on the iMac, and password protected it.

I then went in Finder on the MBP to Go>>Network and selected the iMac as the server of choice. Once sharing is on, it should show up as a choice.

I logged in as the user, and then It gave me a choice of the main drives, e.g. Macintosh HD, Movies, Backup.

I selected Movies, and clicked the Connect button. It then shows up on the desktop of the MBP as a network drive.

Right click it, or CTRL+click it, and then select Make Alias. Drag the Alias shortcut into the `/movies folder of the computer, and Voila...you can watch them streaming using Front Row. This of course depends on the speed of your home network, but I use a b,g network and it works well. A jitter every once in a long while, but not bad.

Best,

Brian

 

[plinden]

Thanks Brian, I'm pretty sure that'll work and give me what I want. Can't wait to get home to try it ... for some reason ssh to my Mac at home is timing out (I hope my Mac is still there ...).

I should really have thought of that myself - it's basically all stuff I've done before - but sometimes you just need someone else to take a look at a problem.