walkah: itunes

I was just in the midst of a Sunday morning podcast & RSS catchup stint, when I caught Episode #131 of commandN where Jeff was outlining some Front Row tips and tricks. It reminded me that I came across a great one recently that I thought I'd share.

As Jeff mentioned, Perian is a great (indispensible) tool to allow QuickTime to play non-QT file formats (particularly AVI/DivX). And, while it's true that Front Row will then play any AVI files in your Movies folder, I've long wanted to go one step further - specifically for TV Shows. See, iTunes will keep TV Shows separately and mark ones that are "unwatched", etc.

Enter Movie2iTunes. This droplet allows you to simply drop Movie & TV Shows on it and it will add them to iTunes. In fact, if your TV Show files use the given file naming convention, the TV Show metadata (show name, season, episode) will be completed correctly as well. The script works by creating a QuickTime media link to the original video - which has the nice benefit of having all your movies and TV shows in iTunes (hence front row) but they can still reside on, say, an external HD. I love it!

I finally experimented with a neat feature in one of my favourite apps for mac os x, growl. There is a very promising looking "Networking" tab in the preference pane for growl. I've often thought that this could be a cool feature, but it was non-obvious how to make it work. Essentially, I have found that it's easiest to play my music off of my mac mini - it has my 100gb collection mounted locally and is directly connected to my speakers - but I'd still like the song-change notification from growl when working on my powerbook (silly, perhaps, but I like it). So, with a little help on IRC from The_Tick, here's how:

• On my powerbook (the growl "client"), I checked "Listen for incoming notifications"
• On my mini (the growl "server"), I checked "Forward notifications to other computers"

That's it. It is that easy. The part that had me stuck was I was expecting the "Add computer" button to do something on my mini. Not true. It's all automatically discovered via bonjour. I was warned that it can be buggy and you can create infinite loops if you try to do two-way notification, but otherwise it's pretty cool if you ask me.