Mountain Lion hostile to Front Row?

To Mike Thormbury

Maybe *you* find Plex super intuitive and a fantastic replacement/alternative to Front Row, but where do you get off insulting people and calling them 'dumb' because they have difficulties trying to get the programme to work for them? As it happens I am furious with Apple for removing Front Row - it was one of the simplest and most elegant peices of software going and allowed me to use my Mac as a media centre. I came here looking for an alternative. I saw your comments and I thought OK I'll give it a go, it can't be that difficult. I have installed it and, yes, it works, sort of, and yes, you need to spend a bit of time sorting out the preferences and so forth. But what the other people complaining about Plex have said is just as true, if not more so, than what you have said. It is a general mess in arranging your media (compared to Front Row), and it is frankly an unintuitive nightmare to navigate. It is not simply a case of having to "configure plex to point to your external 2TB drive and voila!" as you simplistically state. If you do that Plex will catalogue all your files in its own order, not the order they are already in. To get Plex to play your media in the way you have set it up you have to navigate through a number of different menus and there are no preferences that will enable you to select the path as default. (i.e. I have to go to Movies and navigate the menu down to sort 'by folder' every time, simply to be able to look through the media the way it is set up on the Mac - there is no preference to have it sort by folder by defaut.) As I say, it works, but it is a PITA for me, as it is for a lot of other people.

Which is nothing like my experience. I installed it, pointed it to my media files and let it go- It works brilliantly.

I never need to touch it, it just works. I add media to my various locations, it senses that, updates the library, including descriptions, etc.

Very Mac-like.

Where are you going wrong?

I didn't call anyone dumb. It was a reference to his post that the app was 'dumb'

Thin-skinned, just a little, are we?

For what it's worth Front Row was an awful kludge, in my opinion - and surely the majority of Mac users as well, or Apple wouldn't have gotten rid of it.

A brief survey round our office and of my mac owning friends 'What do you think of Front Row?' was met universally with 'what's that?' - not a single person out of more than 30 mac users has even heard of it, let alone used it.

Plex is a HTPC medial player. If you aren't using it for that you can hardly slag it off as being a piece of crap, just as if you were using a word processor to draw diagrams.

The right tool for the job. If your medial needs aren't of the home-theatre variety, you are using the wrong tool - not that the tool is bad.

Could not agree more, XMBC, Plex and the rest are simply garbage. I loved FrontRow and am yet again dumbfounded how much Apple seems content to put more and more training wheels on the OS. This among many other reasons are why I am still running Snow Leo on one of my machines. While I like many of the new features in Mtn. Lion, I am very annoyed at how many things have yet again been broken gimped or removed from the backend. Don't even get me started on Server.app.... At first I was like, finally a unified control for server components but as usual they borked it. Why are we in 2012 and there is STILL not a usable all in one app for a media center. If you want a barely usable TV tuner application you need to pay out the nose for eytetv.

One thing I did eventually do was get an HDHomerun and compiled a version of MythTV on a 2009 Mac Mini. It was a total pain but when all was said and done I had a unified setup with TV support to boot.

If anyone saw last weeks dateline Tim cook mentioned, "Television is an untapped industry and it is something we are very interested in."

ABOUT GODD@(&^D TIME!!!

You could try Movist. It's in the MAS.

It gives you a FrontRow like interface when hitting the remote's menu button. It gives you access to the Movies folder and you can add other folders via the preferences. Can't play iTunes DRM, though. But for all your other movies it will just do fine. No hassle with tags like Plex and the like.

Okay, dirkt68, how did I not know about Movist before? Thanks for turning my attention to this little gem. It plays pretty much everything in my inventory, and it look and feels like Frontrow, more than the recycled Frontrow I was using before.

The only thing I can't figure out is how to get it to start from my Apple Remote (I have to launch it manually first, then control it from either mouse, keyboard, or remote, and remote is best).

I'm sure if the developer continues to support it, it will be a hit.

I'm telling everybody I know about it now!

Thanks

Remote, the free app from Apple on your iPhone or iPad.

Everything in iTunes is just there. Period.

Very simple, very Mac.

I did read the discussion, thank you. You obviously wouldn't buy the iPhone or iPad just to use as a remote. You're not that stupid, nor is anyone else here. Please don't be condescending.

But many people who have a Mac also has an iOS device. For those who do, I offered a suggestion to do exactly that.

Sure, it would be nice if Apple didn't abondon technologies. At some point they presume that's it's time to move on to something else, just not always at the same pace as everyone else thinks so.

Remote, again obviously, being on wireless and not infrared, also works far away not just in front of the computer: in the other room, etc.

Hope everyone finds what they are looking for. Good night!

Anyone try out MediaCentral? I just upgraded to Mountain Lion an hour ago, and decided to Google "Front Row" when my menu button didn't work on my remote. Let's just say I wasn't happy to find out I'd just given up Front Row on my 27" iMac 😟

So, here's hoping to find the alternative.

I loved browsing the movie trailers. 😟

K

OK I'm in LOVE <3 with MediaCentral after 5 minutes. I'm gonna have to check out the competition before paying $37 for one copy (or $74 for up to 5 copies). However, it does everything that everyone above was asking for--works with the Apple Remote, identical to how Front Row did, initiates the software by key combination and the menu button on the remote, does TV, DVDs, Movie folder, online Trailers, online TV "channels", etc. I'm just drooling over it. 😀

-----UPDATE-----

No, it looks like MediaCentral is the only one I can find so far that resembles FrontRow on so many different levels--didn't mention above the Photos and Photo streams options.

http://www.equinux.com/us/products/mediacentral/index.html

Check it out--it has a 5 minute demo and let me know if it's not exactly what you're looking for, too! 🙂 Sheez you would think they were paying me for this...that'd be nice given the price. 😉

Message was edited by: Kaleb McKale

Really? I still haven't upgraded my iMac to Mountain Lion just for that reason. I have it on my MacBoook Pro and LOVE ML, but didn't want to give up Front Row. I may take a chance and buy it, test it on the MBP and if it runs like you say, I'm finally going to upgrade the iMac. Thanks for the info, Kaleb!

* Maybe an issue with DRM content is not resolved completely. It says something about FairPlay on the website, but I don't really know all that much about the DRM stuff. So, someone else will have to give the update on that. Sorry. 😟

Still, I'm excited!