The previous installment of this series introduced Salling Clicker for remote controlling and management of iTunes.

Second Stop - Video

If you like, you can just pop a DVD in the drive and begin to watch. By setting the preference to both play the disc and activate in full-screen by default you get going within minimal intervention. The trick comes when you begin to digitally archive your DVDs to hard disc for playback. Easy playback is potentially a harder goal to achieve when you want to do it without a keyboard and mouse… how do you access the files?

I wanted to find a way today - not waiting on possible projects in development. The answer was actually easier than I thought but definitely involves a bit of both manual labor and repetition. The end is worth it though as I can now pick movies from my digitized DVD collection with a remote and launch the DVD player with a single click.

I knew I was going to need a launcher application for the job and I after a bit of research came back to DragThing($29), which I’ve customized just a touch for my needs. It’s actually a very powerful application and hopefully some of you will get the bug and take this further so we can all benefit.

Drag thing can accept anything you drag onto it and you can choose to create as few or as many tabs (or layers in the DT parlance) within a floating dock. I am using a single dock with one layer currently dedicated to applications and the remaining for DVD movies arranged by genre and a final layer for all movies. I discovered pretty quickly that you can drag the Video_TS archive to the dock and even set the action to open in DVD Player, but it fails… A bit of googling and thinking about the task at hand led me to the following AppleScript solution:

set movie_folder to "/Volumes/X250/DVD/Comedy/ANCHORMAN/VIDEO_TS:"
set movie_path to POSIX file movie_folder
tell application "DVD Player"
	activate
	open VIDEO_TS {movie_path}
	set viewer full screen to true
	set controller visibility to false
	play dvd
end tell

All you have to do is change the path statement to be whatever you have for each movie archive you wish to include. When you Save As (remember save as) you want to save the script as an Application and check the Run only box.

Since the AppleScript above is saved as an application, it can be launched from DragThing as though it were any other app you might launch. One immediate issue you might notice is that the icon is pretty ugly and if you add a bunch, they’ll all look the same. A great free application called Pic2icon solves that as it converts any image file to an icon. The way I’ve been using it is to do a quick lookup on Amazon for the movie, click the box image to get the fullsize version and saving it down to my system. I then just drag that image to Pic2icon and voilá you have a box art icon. You just need to copy and paste it on your script and it’s all good.

That’s pretty much my system in a nutshell. It’s an evolving work in progress and is working quite well so far. I still use my main remote to switch our system from watching TV / PVR to activate the MacHTPC, but once there I can much of what I need with just the keyspan remote in hand.

I set up a tab as you probably noticed for applications I might want to load directly with the remote as well. Here’s a shot of that one:

While this is not the Mac media center interface I’m sure many of us covet, it works, it’s simple and it’s something you can do today with a bit of time on your hands.

– Jonathan Greene

Have you ordered your Mac mini yet?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2005 at 1:45 am and is filed under HTPC, How to, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.