So I've been playing with Front Row in Leopard, along with iTunes music video playback capabilities. It's kind of interesting. Front Row in Leopard is light years beyond what Front Row was doing in Tiger - it's basically Apple TV + DVD capabilities, so that a Mac Mini, then, is an Apple TV with a DVD player, which is all I really want. It's added the capabilities that were missing in the Tiger implementation of Front Row - screen saver disabling, dynamic sourcing for all media, etc.

There are two big faults with it, though, and they're kind of killing me and killing it for my needs.

First off, the music video implementation is crap. Like basically unusable. iTunes doesn't have "music video" as a kind in the sources list under "library." This is madness. Currently, music videos are sorted with music audio files, and there doesn't even seem to be any way to sort them out. SO: if you are happily listening to an audio file in iTunes, and the next selection that comes up is a music video, it will play the music video file and, if you have "show music videos in full screen" selected, it will actually go to full screen, randomly, while you're listening to music while you're working.

This is, of course, incredibly annoying. There should be "music videos" as a source, on the left, like there used to be, I should be able to select it, hit play, and watch my videos be played in shuffle. This used to be possible, now it's gone.

But what's worse, if you want to sit back and veg and just watch all your music videos on shuffle, there's no real way to do it.

So, then, there is a pre-made smart playlist for music videos. And yeah, if you don't have shuffle on, and hit play in this list, it plays one video after another. Yet, amazingly, if I turn shuffle on, iTunes just stops after each one. It doesn't play the next video. If I hit the arrow key to try to play the next one - which works everywhere else in Front Row and iTunes - the video just stops. wtf.

So maybe I can do it in Front Row instead? Nope. Front Row only lets you select a specific video, there is no "shuffle" for music videos. You can just play one. I had thought that maybe it was doing something cool in Front Row, like it just completely integrated music videos with music so when you were playing music it would show the cover, but if the next song was a music video it would play the music video if it had it, basically, so it would be all in one, and that would be awesome, but if you shuffle songs, it basically just skips music videos. If you play a music video and hit the arrow key to go to the next, it randomly, instead, skips like ten seconds of the video and keeps playing the same one. I don't get it.

The last option is to go to the playlist section in Front Row, and hope that when you select the music videos playlist it will play them one by one, but no, it won't, and there's no shuffle in that playlist, like there is in other playlists. Awesome.

Basically, Apple forgot to make a use case of the person who wants to watch music videos on shuffle on their computer or mac mini hooked up to their TV. Like Channel Rick. What's worse, is the workarounds I had before (a playlist with everything video on it, played fullscreen, at random) doesn't seem to work anymore. This is very strange to me considering Apple seems to view music videos as a revenue stream. It's also weird since on the iPhone, they have gone to great lengths to a) make music videos part of the iPod section of the phone, rather than a separate app, like photos are, and b) call them out as a special kind ("videos") as opposed to songs - which is the exact opposite of what they're doing in iTunes/Front Row.*

On the other hand, Front Row now just seems to be an App, rather than some system integrated thing, and I could probably whip up a better app in flash or air or something that would do everything I wanted. Maybe someone should do that. Or, preferably, apple should just fix it. That would be rad. K thnks bye.



* Music video playback is just as bad on the iPhone however. you can only select one. And when it's done, you go back to the interface. It doesn't play the next one. You can't shuffle. You watch them one at a time. I totally don't understand why you'd want to do that. Nor can you, so far as I've figured out, make a playlist on the iPhone of just videos and watch them in order.

Tags: front row, itunes, nerd