Front Row & Meta-data

So, I've been told a few times that the new Front Row in Leopard supports playing of VIDEO_TS folders. I haven't installed Leopard on my home machine yet to confirm this. All of my effort may be for naught, unless perhaps it doesn't work exactly the way I'd like, in which case I'd have to tweak it using one of the methods I've described anyway.

So, last time I was wondering why Front Row seemed to be ignoring the title attributes of my trans-coded DVD title screens. Instead, it would display the full movie file name, such as “Au Revoir Les Enfants.mp4”, which I found to be really annoying (only because it wasn't 100% perfect). Anyway, upon further thinking I realized that it was probably because I was just using Front Row to display the contents of my ~/Movies folder after sym-linking all of the title screens into it, instead of importing these movies into iTunes where their meta-data would be loaded. It seems likely that Front Row doesn't read meta-data at all, but instead relies on the ancillary programs (iTunes, QuickTime, DVD Player) it uses, to provide this information.

Therefore, in my new script, instead of sym-linking the title placeholders into ~/Movies/DVDs, I call an AppleScript at the end to import them all in place:

echo "Adding movies to iTunes..."
osascript ~/bin/add_movies.scpt "$dvds_path"/*/VIDEO_TS/*.mp4

This script basically just converts its command-line arguments into HFS-style colon-separated paths and then tells application iTunes to add them as aliases. You can get a copy of this script here. Now everything works perfectly.