Bruji

I have all of my dvd's and music spread out over 4 external hard drives, and those drives are connected to a 8 Core Mac Pro in my studio. Then I have a Dual 2ghz G5, non intel,that I put in my home theater. Both machines are running Leopard and both have dvdpedia installed. I have the dvdpedia database in the public folder of the 8 Core and I have dvdpedia on both machines pointed to this database and I have not been able to get the dvdpedia on the G5 to work properly. The first time I opened dvdpedia on the G5 I held down the option key and then selected the database in the public folder of the 8 Core. In a few seconds all of my libraries, artwork, and links appeared. But when I tried to play one of the dvd's in dvdpedia, the apple dvd player started up but then nothing happened. If I do the same thing on the 8 Core everything is fine. When I am on the G5 I can see all of the drives that are connected to the 8 Core. So I then went back to the dvd player and selected file > open media > then navigated to one of the external drives and selected a movie and it played back fine. One other issue I have had is that sometimes when I open dvdpedia on the G5 it won't be linked to the database on the 8 Cores public folder. If I then quit dvdpedia and restart with the option key down and select that shared database it will usually load, but there are time when that still does not load that database. So I have to try it a couple of times to get it to load that database. So I have a few questions.
1) Why am I having issues with the database sometimes not loading?
2) Why won't the dvd's play back in dvdpedia when using the G5?
3) I think that I would like the end goal to be to play back everything in FrontRow. It works on the 8 Core, but how can I get it to work on the G5? I know that I have to put an alias of something somewhere. But since I have all of my dvd's and music spread out over 4 drives how do I do this?
Thanks,
Steve

2) This could have to do on how the drives are mounted. It could be the file path the "URL" in the link is not the same from the Intel computers as it is from the G5. To test use the "Go to folder" command in the Go menu in the Finder and put the file path from the URL, it should show your movie folder. Using the program Terminal you can check on the mounted volume names make sure they match ("ls /Volumes" is the command to list the volume names).

1) Since you mention that DVDpedia sometimes does not load even when explicitly telling it with the option key the database, it sounds as there might be network issues. If the connection is not working smoothly it could look like the networked file is not reachable. Also there is a lot of incompatibilities between Intel and PPC all the way down to the file system. It could be a running version of DVDpedia on Intel is locking the Database file from the PPC version as they don't share the same locking mechanisms and it can't insure the integrity of the file (in our test it just locks the second DVDpedia to read only).

3) I think DVDpedia's Front Row plug-in is Intel only. Update: I was wrong, works on both Intel and PowerPC, thank you btlupin.

I have the exact same setup to yours, but I have all my dvds on a nas instead. This works without any problems as the path (the link in dvdpedia) to the dvd is the same for both machines. If you mount the disks on both machines do they have the same path? The path on the G5 has to be the same as the link in dvdpedia.

The frontrow plugin works for ppc and intel.

Roland