Rod wrote:
Well, Front Row has no TV interface for starters :-) And since iTMS
in Australia has no television shows........ no-one is holding their
breath for them either :-)
There are a lot of EyeTV owners out there that would like an
integrated EPG, rather than using the current widget solution offered
by ICEtv. And Windows Media Centre has an SDK, allowing third party
plugins.
For what Front Row does, its fantastic. But problems with the Movie
Trailer service, no tv shows available from iTMS outside the US shows
its not the right solution yet for what a lot of Mac owners are
waiting for. That's why some of us have turned to Windows solutions
that are more mature than Front Row.
Bootcamp is not just about getting cool games to play on the Mac :-)
Seeya
Rod!
Karl Videmanis wrote:
Why would you want to install Media Centre - every intel Mac ships
with Front Row.
Come to think of it, every intel iMac ships with Mac OS X and iLife :-)
Karl
While on the subject, if anyone wants to see what the differences are,
have a look here:
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx>
Not as classy and simple as Front Row, but a lot more functionality.
Furthermore, its embedded in a special version of XP Home, which is not
available without a hardware purchase. So you don't have to worry much
Karl :-)
But.....Parallels are making headway with their virtualisation
software. Beta 5 came out last night with basic USB support and shared
folder support between the Guest OS and OS X. So by the time the final
version comes out, we should have full USB support. Which means you
can run Media Centre or MythTV (Linux) on one screen and OS X on another
(using Virtue Desktops). Making your shared folder the Movie folder,
all your recordings can go straight into Front Row :-) For most people
waiting for VPC for Intel Macs, this looks the most promising. It is
not limited to XP SP2 like Bootcamp, so you can run Linux, all the
flavours of Windows, and even some experimental OSs like SkyOS. The
biggest drawback is lack of graphics hardware support, so it sucks for
games. For everything else, they should run sweet! Obviously native
Intel OS X apps would be the best option, but for those apps that aren't
even on the Mac (and there a lot, especially engineering apps), this
makes a great alternative.
Seeya
Rod!
