Hi,
Front Row works as a media viewer that lets you play music, podcasts,
movies, audiobooks, and display photos on your Mac and easily switch
between these formats. It's accessible, and when you use an Apple
infrared Remote, which is a little smaller than the size of the IPod
Nano 4G -- about the size of a flattened cigarette lighter -- you can
control what is playing through Front Row on your Mac remotely.
(These Apple remotes used to be included with your computer purchase,
but Apple stopped doing this sometime in February 2008, so you'd need
to buy it separately for $19 if, like me, you have a recent MacBook.)
You can also start up Front Row using the Command-Escape keyboard
shortcut and arrow down (or up) through the various menus if you want
to try this out. You can press return (or space bar) to move down
through the menu selections and press the escape key to move up
through the menus (and eventually, out of Front Row). I believe
Front Row is installed on all current Intel Macs, and may be available
for a wider range of machines that run Leopard (including the earliest
generation Intel Mac minis, that didn't originally have Front Row
installed).
Apart from being controllable at a distance through a remote, there
are a few features of Front Row that are slightly different from
simply using iTunes, etc. If you play Movies, you'll find menu
options that will let you play samples from the top 10 Movies at the
iTunes Store, and another that will let you browse through a short
selection of Movie trailers at the iTunes Store. Also, Front Row will
access any local folders you have on your machine, so if you have an
iMovie project, you'll be able to play it under this header even if
the results have not been added to iTunes. Similar features are
available in the other categories: you can access samples of the top
10 Music videos and the top 10 iTunes songs under the Music category,
as well as music in your own library, or samples of the top 10 TV Show
episodes at the iTunes Store under the TV Store. If you have shared
projects in Movies or Photos, or if you Share iTunes libraries (where
you play content from the iTunes library of another Mac or PC that is
running iTunes on your local network that has the library sharing
feature turned on), you can select and play/display this content, as
well.
For people who have iPods other than the iPod Nano 4G, Front Row is a
good way to learn the organization of the menus by category, because
it's very much like the way your iPod selections under Artist, Genre,
Album, etc are organized with one exception: Audiobooks from
Audible.com won't be playable. This is actually the same hitch you'll
run into using Front Row alternatives because of Digitial Rights
Management.
I think Alex is referring to Plex as a Front Row alternative that will
also play/control YouTube videos among its media roster. Here's a
link to a MacWorld description:
http://www.macworld.com/article/136451/2008/10/geekfactorplex.html
Specifically,
<begin quote>
• Plex can play back a wider range of video and audio file formats
than Front Row, including AVI, MPEG files you’ve downloaded via
BitTorrent, FLV Flash files you’ve downloaded from YouTube, and Ogg
Vorbis audio files.
• Plex can play media streamed from shared network drives. That means
you could host your video collection on an old Mac or Windows PC
stashed somewhere out of the way, and still watch it on the Mac in
your living room, office, or bedroom.
• Plex can play large video files that are split up and packed into
archives—such as RAR or ZIP files you might download from Usenet—
without requiring that you extract them first.
<end quote>
However, Plex cannot play purchases from the iTunes Store and
apparently has problems with photo handling.
HTH.
Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 7, 2008, at 5:33 AM, Marty Rimpau wrote:
Hi all, I find that safari plays any youtube video, so why is this
front row needed with youtube?
On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 18:04:51 -0800, Alex Jurgensen wrote:
Hi,
There is a Front Row alternative that works with Youtube. Just thought
I'd write and say that.
Thanks for listening,
Alex,
Marty
