Almost a note to self, but other people may find this useful: how to get Front Row to see videos that are hosted on a PC.
Use Aliases for SMB shares.
Ideally, I should have just been able to start iTunes on my PC and Bonjour would have taken care of the rest… I started Front Row and went to Sources: nothing was showing. Since Bonjour doesn’t give you much in the way of configuration, there wasn’t much I could do with it. Thought the PC Firewall may have been blocking stuff but again: a quick search online didn’t tell me what ports to open.
However, that search did tell me a way around both iTunes and Bonjour:
- Connect to the PC via SMB
- Find a folder on the server you want to see in Front Row’s Sources
- Right click the folder and make an Alias for it
- Move that newly created Alias to your Mac User’s Movie directory (~/Movies)
- Start Front Row and this link should be in your Sources now
Added tip: let Mac OS add your Winodws password to your OSX keychain to avoid issues between boots.
Of course, once I got that working, the iTunes instance from the PC suddenly appeared… maybe it was a login issue – I dunno.
Either way, I like the smb/Alias workaround; works quite well and should work with AppleTV as well.