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If your anyone like me and download quite a bit you probably have an external drive. I Use mine for storing videos, music, and bulkier files that I just don’t need on my laptop when I’m on the go. But when I’m at home and I feel like watching a movie before I hit the sack or even just to relax I normally use the VLC player. Works with pretty much every file I’ve come to encounter and you can stream stuff to other clients. However the draw back of using VLC is the remote. You have to set up your playlist prior, and when the movie ends you wind up back at your desktop. Which kind of annoying when you’re trying to sleep at this point and the room lights up again…

I like front row, it allows you to play your iTunes library, browse trailers of upcoming movies, music videos, and television shows; and with it’s HTPC-esk navigation system it’s easy to do with the Apple Remote (and even sleep your computer when your done).
So I’ve decided to through to together this little walkthrough for the not-so-tech-savy. It’s easy, and prevents you from having to keep those files on your main hard disk. I’d rate this a 3/10 on the difficulty scale.

First things first. Open up terminal.

Open Terminal

From there you should see a window much like this one.

Screenshot of Terminal

You should already be in your home directory, but type:

This will change directories (cd) to your home folder (~), and print the working directory (pwd). Then you want to change directories to your Movies folder, where Front Row looks for videos by default.

Now from here you’re going to need to open up Finder and find the directory of the media files you want to add. Mine is Storage HD/_V. Now that that you know the path go back to Terminal and and type this:

Where are you hiding your media files?

NOTE: Notice there are two types of slashes. ‘/’ is a directory structure where ‘\’ is required only if the directory or drive name has a space. Otherwise it would look something like this:

Once you’re able to get to that directory press the up arrow and copy everything after the $ cd.

now go back to your Movies directory with:

Now we’re going to create a link to the directory with your media inside of your Movies folder so that Front Row can see it. Remember that directory you just copied? Past it in like so.

add a space and add the Movies directory with the new folder name. This would be mine:

Hit enter and presto, you should now be able to see your external drive’s data in Front Row.

Presto! New folder for Front row

Hope this helped, if you have troubles drop me a line.