HOWTO: High-Def Trailers in Front Row

Problem: My new, shiny 1080p television works great with a Mac mini, but it would be even better if the Theatrical Trailers section of Front Row showed 1080p trailers instead of the default standard-def fare. Solution: Direct Front Row to query the local web server for the trailers list. Then use a short Ruby script to create a trailer list with hd-only titles. Read on for the detailed how-to. Note that these instructions assume that you don’t normally use a web proxy, and that you are have enabled Personal Web Sharing. First, download trailers.zip and unzip it into /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables. Then, go to the Proxy setting for your default network interface, and choose to Configure Proxies Using a PAC file. For the PAC File URL, enter file://localhost/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/trailers/proxy.pac — then apply the changes. After that, press shift-cmd-G in the Finder and enter “/etc/httpd/users”. Use your favourite text editor to edit the file your-short-username.conf that should already exist in the folder. As the first line of that file, enter RewriteRule ^/trailers/home/xml/current.xml$ /cgi-bin/trailers/current.rb [PT] Finally, in the Sharing preference pane, switch Personal Web Sharing off and on again. That’s it — Front Row will now show you 1080p trailers! There are some configuration options in the current.rb file — you can choose your desired resolution and whether to include SD-only trailers. Also note that the 1080p trailers demand some serious bandwidth, so most people might be better off with the 720p material.