Enjoy and Manage your Media Files with Front Row

Hello, I’m Milind Alvares. There is no way in hell I’m going to compete with the abominable Aayush in writing a spiffy intro for myself. Not going to happen. After all I’m a simpleton from Goa (the drunkard kind), who just happens to have gone a little crazy about these Apple products. I also happen to run a non-profit blog, Goobimama’s Soggy Blog, which is my medium for wasting other peoples time just as I am doing right now with this crappy intro. So without further ado, here’s how you enjoy your media on your Mac.

Most of you coming from the Windows world must have gotten used to creating separate partitions for movies, music, and then organising them in folders. In the Mac world we do things differently. It is one that really makes you feel like you are in control of your media.

Now, if you buy movies and TV shows from the iTunes store, all of this is all done for you. But what happens when you get your movies from elsewhere? Managing them again in those folders is just painful. With just a little bit of effort, managing media with iTunes has proven to be a real joy. One that I can’t live without.

See all your TV shows at a glance. The blue dot signifies that you have unwatched episodes in there. Hit the “Previous track” button on the remote and it organises all your individual episodes with the most recent ones at the top.

The last episode you watched is marked with the blue dot. You also know immediately which is the episode number and such.

Nothing like choosing which movie you want by looking at it’s movie poster. Also, you get to resume where you left off if the movies are added this way.

So,

- Easier access to media while in Front Row. No digging through countless menus
- Better organisation of TV shows/music videos which were not downloaded from Apple iTunes Store. So you don’t never miss an episode.
- Managing your media with movie information, Cover art and such. A real pleasure when browsing through your collection with the remote. Especially useful when there’s a girl around.
- You can play MKV h264 files without the loading time associated with Perian codecs.
- Useful for keeping your music video collection separate from the rest of it.

How to add your media to iTunes Library

So what do you have to do for all of this? Nothing much really.

Basically any file that opens in Quicktime, can be converted to work with iTunes. Make sure you have Perian installed or you won’t be able to open many files.

So you open the file, Save As, and save it as a self contained movie. If it is an MKV file, you will have to wait for it to load before saving.

After that you can just add the file to iTunes by dragging it to the Library in the sidebar.

Use the “Reference Movie” option if you would want to someday play those original files on a PC. Use the Self-contained movie if you need only to play on your mac and would like to avoid the extra file. Personally, I’d go with reference movie cause it’s much faster.

Note that if you don’t want to copy your media over to where the iTunes library resides, you can deselect the “Copy files to iTunes folder” in the iTunes settings > Advanced tab. This is useful if you have HD movies cause they will take a long time to copy over. Just change it back whenever you are adding music files and such. Also, do not ever click the “Consolidate music library” cause it will copy all your files and going to create a mess.

Alternative Method
Alternatively, a better way is save the movie as a “Reference movie” and add that reference movie to your iTunes library. This way, your original movie is untouched, the benefits of which are:

- Quicker. A lot quicker. Generating a 1MB file is much faster and is really nice for TV shows cause there’s so many of them.
- You don’t mess with the original container (DTS soundtracks behave differently if in a different container than originally muxed)
- You can transfer the original avi or whatever to a PC and play it there as the .mov container sometimes causes problems on a PC (even on VLC)

Once in iTunes, you can just right click, Get Info, and in the Video Tab, select the video kind as TV show, Music Video, or Movie (default). Of course, you can add cover art by selecting all the files of a particular type, Get Info, and then drag an image into the “Album art” box in the lower right. Get your movie poster artwork at Internet Movie Poster Awards. However, make sure you delete the default thumbnail created by iTunes cause otherwise the poster will not show in Front Row.

For adding posters for TV shows, select all, Get info, and then drag the poster in the right “Album art” box. Note that these days, Front Row separates your TV shows even by Season number. So I like to take a TV poster, open in Photoshop and add the season number to it so I know which season it is while browsing in the TV shows section.

There you have it, your media in your Front Row interface, ready to view.

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• Playing Multimedia Video files on Mac OS X
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