Playing Front Row on TV

Front row exhibits some strange behavior when switching primary/secondary screens. The problem is related to the fact that front row does not quit when you exit it, and if you switch screens while it is running it will remember what screen it first started on and continue to come up on that one. The "solution" is to kill the front row process after you switch primary/secondary displays.
So:
Make TV primary.
Terminal: killall "Front Row"
Activate front row

good luck

hi,
killall is a UNIX command

So: killall "Front Row" in the terminal will stop the front row process that is running in the background.

you can also do this in Activity Manager in the Utilities folder. just search for front row and quit the process.


Then by Activate front row i just meant with the remote or cmd+esc, that is not a command.

there is nothing to reverse, you are just fully quitting front row when you do killall, when you hit the remote menu button it restarts it, hopefully on the correct screen.

That is weird. Are you sure you are typing it correctly:
killall

all one word.

type: which killall
it should return: "/usr/bin/killall"

if that doesn't work, try opening "Activity Monitor" its in Applications/Utilities

in the search field type front row, if it is running it will show up. click on the process and click the stop sign "quit process"

Now, it won't show up if it hasn't been started once yet. The point here is that front row starts on the primary screen if it isn't running yet. So if it doesn't show up in activity monitor, it isn't running, and should start on your tv if its the primary monitor. What we are trying to do here is fully quit front row every time you swap your primary/secondary monitors.

There is currently no easy way to do this. There should really be a preference somewhere to set the default front row screen. This should have been a feature in front row 1, but it wasn't and still isn't. I maintain that apple deliberately makes front row difficult to use to sell more Apple TVs, which is a shame.

Anyway, the bug you are experiencing goes like this:

You have two displays, iMac and TV. You want iMac to be your primary display always, and front row to show up on your TV -- the secondary display. You don't want to mirror your displays for obvious reasons.

This is impossible.

Front row does not fully quit when you exit back to the OS. It stays running as a background process. When it starts up cold it asks, who is the primary monitor? Say it's your TV, it saves that information and starts up on the TV. It also says I will now appear on the TV no matter who the primary display is. So after exiting front row, but not killing the background process, you switch your displays to make the iMac the primary. Then you enter back into front row and it magically appears on your TV because it remembers that that is where it first started up. If you go in the terminal or activity monitor and kill the front row process, and then restart it, front row will appear on the iMac.

This could have been a workable situation had apple not decided to also make the front row process self terminate after a pre determined time of inactivity. You could imagine first starting front row on the TV and then switching the iMac back to the primary display, and as long as you did not reboot, front row would always appear on the TV. Not the case.

The only solution is to first kill the front row process if it is already running, switch the TV to the primary display, and start front row.

I developed a good way of doing this using a combination of applescript, a utility called cscreen, X-keys (a hotkey manger), and a bluetooth cellphone as a remote. I believe this is the only completely "from the couch" solution.

here is how its done:
1. download cscreen (a utility to swap the primary/secondary monitor)
http://forums.macosxhints.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1416&d=1156306718
place cscreen in your applications folder

2. write an applescript to swap the screens and kill the front row process
(i'll paste some code later tonight, i don't have it at work)

3. set x-keys or some 3rd party remote software to run the applescript

4. start front row

this procedure has served me well for a year now. using a bluetooth remote is actually more useful here than the apple remote because it can be used to launch the applescript. if you don't have one, you will at least have a one click solution.

oh the things we have to come up with to use our computers...

goodluck

So here you go:

try
do shell script "/Applications/cscreen -s 2 -p; killall 'Front Row'"
end try


create a new apple script, paste that in there, save as an application.

make sure cscreen is in your Applications folder.

double click to toggle your displays. the killall command will make sure that front row starts on the primary screen always.

you can use something like xkeys to run it as well:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11127/xkeys

good luck, let me know if this works out for you.

do shell script "/Applications/cscreen -s 2 -p; killall 'Front Row'"+ the TV

🙂

I have done this and it swaps my displays perfectly - thanks!

Just tried "TV Row" and it works well:
http://forum.onemorething.nl/viewtopic.php?t=126593
It installs the mysterious cscreen executable and a nifty application (TV Row.app) that starts Front Row on the second display and blanks out the primary display.
When you quit Front Row you just need to press the Return key on the keyboard to restore the primary display (actually it is waiting with an OK prompt on the second display).
However, be aware that this type of application could crash your system.

While TVrow is very easy to use. I feel it does way too much for the task we want. It sets virtually everything on display 2 icons programs dock etc. We only need the unix program displaysinfo to set front row to use another display. The program works with tiger and leopard. I don't know applescript yet so this command needs to be set every time you active additional displays.

Here is how to use displaysinfo
Run the displaysInfo utility from the command line and look for the number labelled d2_ID (if you are using display 2) in displayInfos output. Add this number (69681665 in the example below) as parameter to the defaults write command as shown below:

defaults write com.apple.frontrow FrontRowUsePreferredDisplayID 69681665

The program is available at this location http://rapidshare.com/files/54473723/displaysInfo.zip