May 8, 2008, 10:41 pm

OSX is nice , and not because it has no shortcomings , but because you can fix them as opposed to windows.
This has a lot to do with the power of osx that stems from it having applescript and a posix compliant shell.

Here is how to change metadata of files so you can play divx movies with itunes for example , with terminal and devtools
, with applescript http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=214705

Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.

Next on let's take downloading movies from youtube , you have the option of using a shell script http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080216181658527 , apple script http://bbs.macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=19531 , and finally a full application http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/tubetv/ that is the best option in this case.

Now how about playing every movie format there is including the flash movies you just downloaded from youtube in anything you like , quicktime , itunes , frontrow etc , well then just download http://perian.org/ and never care about formats of movies ever again.

To top it off i have a script for those times when you do want to know what are your movie files encoded with , this is a extremely fast shell script , with basic info , you can get it packaged as a osx app to drag folders to or directly as a cross-platform script.