avi movies in front row and itunes

Everyone has those divx movies , you can play them in quicktime given you have the proper codecs like Perian , but the pesky itunes will not add the files to its library.
What we need to do is basically change metadata of files by adding type “MooV” to them , the simplest way to do it is download this applescript droplet i wrote and just drag the files you want fixed on its icon.
A more involved way to do it that needs devtools (found on the install dvd) installed is by entering the bold text below in Terminal , after you modified the path and extension to suit your needs.
find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”
Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote ??!! , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.
Posted: May 8th, 2008
Categories: osx
Tags: , , , ,
Comments: 2 Comments.
Comments
Comment from Claude - October 2, 2009 at 7:01 pm

I’ve tried to use your applescript pointed here to flag my files as movies since most of them doesn’t play in Front Row (black screen with audio).

Unfortunately Snow Leopard seems to have broke the ability to drag a file on an applescript droplet.

Is there a way to make this work again ?

Comment from vlad - October 2, 2009 at 7:22 pm

I can guarantee it works in Snow Leopard , just tested it on it , after you drag the files to it the script should run for a second or so then exit , you can test by doing “getfileinfo -t /path/to/movie.file” in terminal if it worked , what behavior are you seeing ?