Archive for November 3rd, 2007

Mac Mediacenter

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

My G4 Mac mini is hooked up to my tv- and stereo system, and I’m using it everyday to watch movies and play music from my iTunes library.

Since there is no IR receiver in the mini I purchased a Keyspan Remote Express (which works great) and have been testing lately some mediacenter apps to work with it (a hack to run Front Row on my G4, CenterStage, iTheater and mMedia which are all freeware. As well as the non-free MediaCentral and XHub in demo mode).

Before I was able to come to a final conclusion I upgraded my system to Mac OS X Leopard.

One of the features of Leopard is the the fact that Front Row now is included in the OS and also runs on older G4-machines…no more need to hack it, and it runs like a charm!

This new version of Front Row (2.0) is doing a nice job as MediaCenter app, the interface is slick (copied from the Apple TV) and it works great with my Keyspan Remote Express. I will keep an eye on CentralStage though…if they can pull off what they show in the screenshots, they have a killer app.

But for now, Front Row it is…Apple pulled it off again!