I love Front Row. No amount of AppleScripting, Cocoa hacking, and VLC tweaking comes even remotely close to the elegance, beauty, or ease of use that Front Row brings to my living room. Apple’s recent inclusion of Bonjour networking to collect all of your home’s media into one interface has added even more to the equation, as you can now view any media in your home without having to go through the trouble of copying it from one machine to another – a big deal when you just used your G5 to encode a handful of DVDs and want to watch them on the TV.
With this elegance, beauty, and ease of use comes simplicity. Simplicity is a beauty in its own right, but it usually comes bundled with an uglier cousin – lack of features. Front Row does your MPEG-compatible movie formats, your iPhoto library, your Music, and your DVDs. Beyond that, it does nothing. Not a damned thing.
Front Row should…
To more easily integrate into the entertainment system, Front Row needs a little more functionality. Apple needn’t – and probably shouldn’t, given their business model – produce a PVR system, but it should provide some sort of functionality to interoperate with the one you already own. Whether you have an Elgato EyeTV or a TiVo, Front Row should allow some basic cross-functionality.
Instead of connecting your Mac mini to yet another of your sparse AV inputs on your TV or receiver, Apple could enable a “passthrough” module in Front Row that allows you to place your Mini between another video source – such as your cable, satellite box, or TiVo – and your TV. From the Front Row menu, you could choose to partake from any of Front Row’s traditional offerings or watch live TV, all without sacrificing a precious input and unifying how you access your media a little more.
But why bother?
Even if you have enough inputs to spare, this buys us something else. Imagine, if you would, if Apple would provide some way of injecting information into the video stream from Front Row. Third-party developers could write modules allowing you to be notified of new e-mail, instant messages, and updates to your favorite websites (via RSS!) overlayed on top of your TV, QuickTime, iTunes, or other content. Hell, if Apple allowed access, all you’d really need is Growl".
Is there a way of accessing DV (firewire) camera video using Front Row? I have a Canopus ADVC 55 analogue TV to DV convertor that looks, to OS X, like a firewire camera. It gives good quality video in iMovie when I input an SD digital TV signal. Now all I need is to be able to access that video from Front Row instead of iMovie and the G5 becomes a complete home entertainment centre.
I’m not asking for much from Front Row but a couple of incredibly basic things would be nice:
1) Ability to delete a file from your computer after watching
2) Resume playing from the last known playpoint for a file
3) Give me access to any disc or drive mounted on the computer, without making me create a bunch of aliases to make it work
4) Right now the display is half-and-half split between thumbnail images of the videos in the list, and the names of the files – more space for the NAMES please…
5) I wouldn’t mind the ability to turn of all the crap I don’t use, like Movie Trailers, etc.
I do not believe this
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