Lion and Front Row

[bitzcool]

No dice for me, it doesn't show up in the list of Front Row menu items. Anything I could do differently?
I'm taking the DVDpedia.frappliance and putting it in Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row/Contents/PlugIns folder

any other suggestions, would really, really like this to work!

[Conor]

That should be the place. Try this installer instead it will install the files for you.

Also try restarting Front Row. Use the program Activity Monitor found in Applications/Utilities/ for this. If FrontRow is listed as a process in that window, select it and use the "Quit" command on the toolbar. (Since FrontRow is sort of a backend application this is the only real way to quit it.)

[geeji]

I just installed Front Row, DVDpedia and DVDpedia Front Row Plugin 5 on Lion 10.7.4, and I have the same problem as bitzcool : no DVDpedia entry in Front Row base menu.
I did use the frontRow5Installer.zip installer which completed OK, restarted the Mac, still no DVDpedia menu.
Front Row 1.1 works fine, DVDpedia (4.6.8 and 5.1.1) works fine, but the plugin is ineffective.
I checked in the Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/PlugIns folder, the DVDpedia.frappliance plugin is there, only funny thing is that it is dated 30/11/2011.
I threw it away, reinstalled, same result.

Is there any other file which should be installed (or removed) ?
Could anybody confirm that the DVDpedia Front Row Plugin 5 worked for them with Front Row 1.1 on Lion 10.7.4 ?
It is a pain, since this inability to run the DVDpedia plugin into Front Row is currently the only thing which blocks me from migrating to Lion (I hate Plex...).

[geeji]

The console messages confirm that the DVDpedia.frappliance plugin was found but did not load, but unfortunately gives zero hint on the actual problem nature.

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11/08/12 09:52:44,353 FrontRow: ******** Application Startup ********
11/08/12 09:52:45,040 FrontRow: Failed to allow loading of appliance /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/PlugIns/DVDpedia.frappliance
11/08/12 09:52:45,040 com.apple.RemoteUI: dyldNameStartingAtAddress:vm_read header (os/kern) invalid address
11/08/12 09:52:45,061 Front Row: [Loader] in className
11/08/12 09:52:45,388 FrontRow: T:[0xac2a52c0] Registered BRPhotoPlayer for media type 3
11/08/12 09:52:45,388 FrontRow: T:[0xac2a52c0] Registered FRITunesAppMusicPlayer for media type 0
11/08/12 09:52:45,388 FrontRow: T:[0xac2a52c0] Registered FRVideoPlayer for media type 1
11/08/12 09:52:45,388 FrontRow: T:[0xac2a52c0] Registered FRDVDPlayer for media type 2
11/08/12 09:52:49,171 FrontRow: T:[0xac2a52c0] Start up render thread for display: 0x7652bcc1
11/08/12 09:52:56,347 FrontRow: T:[0xac2a52c0] Stop render thread

I also checked that other third parties plugins (EyeTV.frappliance) properly load and execute within Front Row.
This problem seems thus to be specific to the DVDpedia plugin, not to Front Row on Lion by itself.
Any help greatly appreciated...

[Conor]

Thank you for all the details, normally it would be easy to point to the issue with the console log report; But at you mention Front Row is being cryptic as to why it does not want to load the plugin.

I have tested it on Lion again and can confirm it working. Do try installing the plugin directly yourself from this download (this is a zip of the plugin from Lion test system). Although it would be the same one from the installer that was indeed last built in "30/11/2011". You would manually copy it into "Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/PlugIns". But I am thinking it might be a missing component from Front Row in the Lion install. I can no longer remember the steps I took to install Front Row on this machine, so sadly I can't list them here.

[geeji]

Thanks Conor for the new DVDpedia.frappliance download, unfortunately I still have the same Console "no load" message (I rebooted, just in case : no dice ).
However, now that I know for sure this plugin DOES work on (some) Lion (I am assuming 10.7.4 as myself), there is some hope.

A few more information :
- it was a clean install of Lion 10.7.4 on a 2009 Mac Mini
- I am running Lion in French (as I did Snow Leopard, which worked fine with Front Row 2.2.1 + DVDpedia 4.6.8 + DVDpedia 2.0.6 plugin)
- I used this installer from this post for Front Row on Lion, did not do it all by hand
- I tried both DVDpedia 4.6.8 and 5.1.1, and 2.0.6 and 5.0.0 versions of the DVDpedia Front Row plugin, no difference.
- I uninstalled Front Row + reinstalled Front Row and plugin, no difference

I suppose the next step would be to reinstall Lion in English, to see if it explains the difference; or to reinstall Front Row "by hand" from an English version.
Do you have any feeling about the most likely source of incompatibility ?

[geeji]

I made a few more tests to try to understand why some people like Conor can run the DVDpedia Front Row plugin on Lion while I never can :
- clean Lion install in English instead of French : no dice
- clean Lion 10.7.0 install instead of 10.7.4 : no dice
- DVDpedia 5.1.1 full reinstall with DVDpedia Front Row 5 plugin : no dice
- boot the same Lion Firewire disk from a MacBook Pro instead of the Mac Mini : no dice
- install Lion, Front Row, DVDpedia and DVDpedia Front Row plugin on the Mac Mini internal disk, instead on an external Firewire disk partition : no dice
- install javaformacosx10.7 on top of Lion 10.7.4 : no dice

In all cases, DVDpedia and Front Row work fine by themselves, but the DVDpedia menu fails to show in Front Row home page and I get (in various order) the same 3 error messages in the Console log :

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14/08/12 15:11:05,377 FrontRow: ******** Application Startup ********
14/08/12 15:11:06,336 com.apple.RemoteUI: dyldNameStartingAtAddress:vm_read header (os/kern) invalid address
14/08/12 15:11:06,337 com.apple.RemoteUI: vmutils: can't find image for dynamic loader used by /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/MacOS/Front Row [279]!
14/08/12 15:11:06,337 FrontRow: Failed to allow loading of appliance /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/PlugIns/DVDpedia.frappliance

The com.apple.RemoteUI errors in the log seem to be definitely related to the DVDpedia plugin loading issue, since no such error occurs in the log BEFORE I install the DVDpedia.frappliance; furthermore, there is a somewhat related message in the DVDpedia Front Row Installer Installation Log :

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22/08/12 12:21:55,641 installd: PackageKit: ----- Begin install -----
22/08/12 12:22:08,714 xpchelper: could not open dyld map file: (null)
22/08/12 12:22:08,953 installd: Installed "DVDpedia Front Row" ()
22/08/12 12:22:08,961 installd: PackageKit: ----- End install -----

At this stage, the only explanation I can imagine is that those who succeeded in running the DVDpedia Front Row plugin used different installation procedures (?) or different binaries (??) or different versions of Lion (???).
It would be great if somebody who has the plugin running could give me the step-by-step installation procedure he actually used...

Having exhausted all my ideas at that point, I will now forget Lion and (regretfully) stay on Snow Leopard.
Hopefully, somebody will resurrect Front Row on Mountain Lion, and the DVDpedia plugin at the same time...

[geeji]

I wondered if my problems with the non loading DVDpedia.frappliance did not come from some Rosetta/PPC issue : although the DVDpedia 5 plugin is Intel only (as DVDpedia 5.x.x is Intel only), all the other binaries used by Front Row (2x Front Row apps, BackRow, iPhotoAccess) are "Universal" binaries imported from Snow Leopard, and the dyld error messages look like some you may get when trying to load/execute PPC code on Intel architecture, which is the only one Lion supports.
So I slimmed down the binaries of all 4 executables (using ditto Terminal command) to Intel-only : no dice
Ah well...

[Conor]

I rebuilt the freappliance (after finding the necessary PPC headers and files) to be universal. Here is a link to a new universal version that you can try by installing in the Front Row frappliance folder.

If that fails try modifying the RemoteUI launch deamon in /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.RemoteUI.plist and setting the value to false (NO) so that it does not launch or actually removing the file. You would then need to restart the computer to disable the RemoteUI deamon.

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	<key>com.apple.RemoteUI</key>
	<false/>

[geeji]

Thanks a lot Conor for this new Universal version of the DVDpedia.frappliance 5.
Unfortunately, no dice, I still get the same exact 2 error messages, so that was an other wrong suspect.

I also tried disabling the com.apple.RemoteUI daemeon by manually removing the /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.RemoteUI.plist, and then the only difference is that I get the same Console error messages, with "com.apple.RemoteUI" being replaced by "[0x0-0x19019].com.apple.frontrow" :

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24/08/12 12:03:30,251 FrontRow: ******** Application Startup ********
24/08/12 12:03:31,930 [0x0-0x19019].com.apple.frontrow: dyldNameStartingAtAddress:vm_read header (os/kern) invalid address
24/08/12 12:03:31,930 [0x0-0x19019].com.apple.frontrow: vmutils: can't find image for dynamic loader used by /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/MacOS/Front Row [232]!
24/08/12 12:03:31,953 FrontRow: Failed to allow loading of appliance /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/PlugIns/DVDpedia.frappliance

I tried alternatively to disable the IR Receiver (through System Preferences/Security/General/Advanced) while keeping the com.apple.RemoteUI.plist file in place, no difference, same error messages (with com.apple.RemoteUI).

I apologize for those false tracks which wasted more of your time. One should never attempt to outguess the professionals...
What really stumps me is that it works always for you and never for me, even after a clean install, even when we test on the same Lion installed on identical machines (MacBook Pro 2009 2.53GHz).
Some gremlin at work !

[Conor]

The fact that it fails on your machine including a virtual machine is definitely just the mystery. Thank you for the kind words, but I am quite the opposite of a professional. When it comes to Objective-C and Cocoa I do know a little bit, but Front Row is dark territory for me. Googling the issue it seems that it is not only in DVDpedia where people get the same loading error with other plugins. Sadly it does seem to be limited to specific machines, as there are never any solutions on the forums were I was able to find mentions of Front Row not loading a plugin.

[geeji]

I liked the song !
Actually, you can find on Google some remotely related references to frappliance not loading... in Apple TV ! And they found a solution apparently related to some "signature" certificate, in addition to switching back to English.
Although the source code for ATV/iOS was likely Front Row, difficult to say if this mixture of signature and language issues is anything other than one more false trail.
Especially since I don't understand anything about Lion signatures (of DVDpedia.frappliance ? of Front Row ??), and also because when I reinstalled Lion using English as language (instead of French), it did not work any better.
Ah well...

EDIT : it is interesting to note that all Apple-made *.frappliance plugins packets in Front Row have digital signatures (ex: /System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app/Contents/PlugIns/DVD.frappliance/Contents/_CodeSignature), while DVDpedia.frappliance has none.
But that still does not explain why this absence would be passing on some (English ?) systems and fatal on some other (foreign ?) systems, especially since, AFAIK, code signature checking is not mandatory in Lion.

[Conor]

Code signing only takes a few minutes, so it's worth a try. Here is the previous universal version with our valid code signature applied.

[geeji]

GGGGrrrrrrrrr : thanks once more Conor, but again the same 3 usual error messages, one more false trail .

Guessing and trying will lead us nowhere unless I can get some more detailed information about the specific problem on my system.
I thought I had found some useful tool using DTrace/errinfo, except that I cannot make it work on errinfo (Murphy's luck : it works on other commands !) : when I launch errinfo I get an OTHER (!!) error message : "ERROR1: reading errno.h: No such file or directory".
I installed Xcode, thinking that may be some debugging files were not installed by default : no difference.
I tried to find a copy of errno.h to install it myself, but found none global to OS X.

Conor, have you used this tool and do you think, if I was able to make it work, it would give useful information about the DVDpedia.frappliance loading failure ?
If so, I will try again to make it work.


PS: I have no idea if it is trivial or complicated, and please ignore it if it takes more than a few minutes, but if it was possible for you to create and upload an .iso image of your test system boot disk (the one working with Lion 10.7.4 + DVDpedia 5.1.2 + DVDpedia.frappliance 5), I could restore it on an external Firewire disk and boot from it : it SHOULD then work on my system, damn it !!
Sorry, but it makes me crazy that nothing of what we do brings us any closer to an understanding of the problem specific to my system...

[geeji]

Well, I finally managed to make DTrace/errinfo run on Lion, using Pacifist to copy errno.h from Xcode.mpkg within a Snow Leopard install DVD into /usr/include/sys/errno.h (for whatever reason, I was not able to do the equivalent from the Xcode.app application for Lion downloaded from the App Store).
Unfortunately, the return codes are not any more detailed, and DTrace itself seems to be full of problems :

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         Console    read_nocancel   21  Is a directory 
         Console    read_nocancel   35  Resource temporarily unavailable 
            ntpd       sigsuspend    4  Interrupted system call 
            ntpd        sigreturn   -2 
            ntpd __pthread_canceled   22  Invalid argument 
            Dock    __mac_syscall   93  Attribute not found 
           Front              Row    0 
         launchd   fcntl_nocancel    9  Bad file descriptor 
   coreservicesd   process_policy   22  Invalid argument 
           Front              Row    0 
           Front              Row    0 
           Front              Row    0 
           Front              Row    0 
           Front              Row    0 
           Front              Row    0 
           Front              Row    0 
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 365 (ID 258: syscall::mprotect:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 67 (ID 854: syscall::thread_selfid:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 71 (ID 846: syscall::workq_kernreturn:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 76 (ID 836: syscall::kevent:return): invalid user access in predicate at DIF offset 0

I kept the full log is somebody is interested in forensic studies...

In an other attempt, I installed Front Row on Mountain Lion (by hand since both installers fail), was able to activate it, but... without the DVDpedia menu entry appearing either.
Ah well, it seems being terminally stuborn is not enough to crack that one