[MW Forums]

A month after his first look at Front Row alternative MediaCentral, Christopher Breen gives the recently updated multimedia management application a second test drive. MediaCentral 2 offers scads more features, cleans up some of the bugs found in earlier versions, but also includes a few lapses and inconsistencies. more

[50Miles]

Any chance Front Row will learn to read video_ts files in the future?

[MiniMoe]

I'm not sure why they bother to continue to price the product in U.S. dollars if they're going to abandon the U.S. TV market (ElGato) for DVB/CODFM and not expand into ATSC/8VSB.

[Peter Cohen]

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Any chance Front Row will learn to read videots files in the future?

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Anything is possible, though obviously where Apple is concerned, they don't talk about products prior to their release. DVD Player can read videots files, however, so it'd be nice if Front Row had similar capabilities...

[Machound]

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Elgatos popular EyeTV PVRs arent supported

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Yeah, but anyone who's seen EyeTV 2.3 public beta would have little reason to consider MediaCentral for that purpose. EyeTV 2.3 gives us everything we'd want in a glorious 10 foot interface.
Overall, MediaCentral 2.0 hasn't been too well received in the online forums. I hope that changes in the future. For now, Front Row remains squarely in the lead for DVD playback, both in terms of audio and video quality which, sadly, isn't much of an endorsement.
I'm not writing Equinux off just yet, but excitement over MediaCentral seems to be dissipating as time passes. Feature bloat seems to be taking priority over fixing core issues. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

[rogerr]

No surround? What were they thinking? I continue to be perplexed at how (apparently) difficult it is to develop an app that delivers true videophile features to the Mac. Forget about TV or games any of that other stuff. What I want is software that will make it easy to rip DVDs to a hard drive and have enough video and audio playback savvy to match the performance of my Bravo D-1 (or heck, almost any decent stand alone dvd player). Why is this so hard? On the PC side, everyone raves about TheatreTek. Where is TheatreTek for Mac?

[rogerr]

Wow, that is a pretty devastating thread over at AVS. In general, the media server market seems in chaos right now. The frustrating thing is that the Mini is just about the ideal device for this: small, quiet, DVI and optical audio out, easily expandable via inexpensive external drives. I'd buy one in a second except for lack of decent HT software. Gah!

[Machound]

I haven't used it myself, but there are multiple people who run TheaterTek on a CoreDuo Mini in Boot Camp. Unfortunately, TheaterTek doesn't work in Parallels.
This is not the solution we envision for the Mac but it's available now and it works on a Mini... in Boot Camp.

[rogerr]

Thanks, I hadn't thought about the boot camp option. But as you say, one usually doesn't buy a Mac to run Windows as their main operating system!