Naquada

So there was one issue with the new MacBook; playing shared video either via iTunes or via Front Row, it just didn’t work, fullstop

I expressly wanted to be able to stream audio and video from iTunes on the G5 back to a number of Mini Mac systems round the house, and getting the MacBook was a great way of actually testing to see if the wireless was up to playing it round the house.

I was very disappointed at first to find that although audio streamed no problem at all through iTunes and Front Row on the MacBook, video just caused a major headache for the MacBook.

At best Front Row came up with the message ‘The remote host is having issues playing this video’ or, Front Row just hung with a blank screen, or even sometimes iTunes on the MacBook hung and eventually needed to be killed.

I was initially thinking that this was an issues with my iTunes folder being on a linux box over samba, and I was ready this morning to head out and get a big SATA drive to put in the mac, but I wanted to try a local copy of a video first.

Setting the preferences to not copy the video into the iTunes library on import kept the video locally on the mac, but alas, the issue was still there, neither iTunes or Front Row on the MacBook would play the video.

A little more head scratching and thinking pointed me to some websites that discussed the MP4 tags needing to be very correct for iTunes to allow streaming, why I have no idea, but anything was worth a try..

A little digging later and I found Lowell Stewart’s Lostify; a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It allows you to change or enhance the MP4 tags on encoded video, and with a little conversion, I updated the tags and re-imported the video into the iTunes library.

Happily this completely fixed the problem, both iTunes and Front Row could then play the shared video. If you encode using things like Handbreak or use iSquint, the MP4 tagging seems not up to Front Row and iTunes standards.. So thanks Lowell, Lostify opens up a whole new world of video streaming, and seems to be a fix most Front Row users don’t know about..

If you do use Lostify, make sure you drop Lowell some money via pay pal, its worth a little of any ones money!!

I’m actually very impressed with the speed and quality of the streaming even over wireless from a remote samba iTunes library, and Front Row really is a nice application for intel macs, line up those Mini Mac’s, we’re going streaming…