Speed up certain Front Row operations

Nov 07, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: boothefox

A few days ago, I decided to use Front Row as my media center application. After installing all of the available codecs, Front Row can handle about 95% of my entire video library. But that's not the story...

Browsing the Movies section of Front Row, Front Row freezes up for some annoying five to ten seconds. This also happens after watching videos when you try to go back out to your desktop. After a bit of poking around, I figured out that this is because Front Row is trying to connect either to Apple's movie trailer site or to my network drive. It turns out that Apple is way too far from these places, and that's the cause.

Since I won't use apple.com on that particular computer, the solution is simple. Open Terminal and type sudo pico /etc/hosts, and add one more line which reads 127.0.0.1 &nbsp www.apple.com. Then press Control-X, the "Y" key, and Enter to save the changes. You're done; enjoy the speed.

To reverse this action, do the same thing as above, but remove the added line and save the file again.

[robg adds: This definitely works, but I do not recommend it as a general solution for any Mac -- it's hard to say if there are other apps that access apple.com, but if there are, they may stop working as expected. If you have a dedicated media machine, however, and you don't need any of apple.com's content in Front Row, this does provide a nice speed increase.]

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