New to Mac / Front Row

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I'm considering getting a Mac Mini and was wanting to know some things on Front Row.



When it sees other shared iTunes libraries on the network, does it pull the playlists from each library as well? Or is it just an aggregated list of everything in that library? Also is there a limit to how many shared libraries you can see through Front Row on your network? Also does it matter if one of the shared libraries is on a PC?



Sorry for the ignorance...new to a lot of this Apple stuff.



Thanks,

Josh

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Yes playlists too, you can see PC's etc. etc. I never use it really myself.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    jturmeljturmel Posts: 3member
    Yeah this is going to be for a media center in our living room. Thanks for the info!



    Josh
  • Reply 3 of 5
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    If you haven't used Front Row before, I'd suggest you do before putting out the money for a Mini. I find Front Row to be one of the most useless programs I've ever used. It regularly freezes on me and takes a while to start up. Every machine I've used it on it's the same. I could understand that some network delays would affect the loaded content but it shouldn't affect the program itself. I find the browsing feature to be way too slow. Always clicking that little plastic button which feels very cheap for an apple product btw. Others will love it but I am really not impressed by it at all so try it out.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    jturmeljturmel Posts: 3member
    What do you guys recommend for a media center then? (Besides AppleTV)



    J
  • Reply 5 of 5
    daibachdaibach Posts: 18member
    Hi Josh,



    I have a Mac Mini that I use as a media centre and it works brilliantly. I have two external 500GB hard drives connected to it where I store all my video, music and photo content. I spent an age ripping my DVDs but it was time well spent - it's now so easy and convenient to access a favourite movie or episode of a TV show. I don't have a HD TV (just a standard widescreen) and the quality is just fine when watching videos.



    Front Row works perfectly. When I first started using it I did occasionally get the freezes that Marvin mentions, but after a few tweaks and upgrades it now to works okay. Here's what I did:



    - make sure that iTunes and iPhoto are always running - Front Row starts them up when it starts, so having them already running makes Front Row start quicker.



    - since all my content is local to the Mac Mini I switch off all file sharing - since Front Row uses iTunes, with sharing switched off it doesn't waste time looking for shared content



    - don't put any videos in iTunes - create aliases in the Movies folder instead



    - finally more memory - I upgraded to 2GB and saw a big difference in performance and I now don't get any freezes



    Now, I'm not saying Front Row is perfect, but it does the job better than any other media centre programs I've tried (MediaCentral, Xhub). It'll be interesting to see what Front Row 2.0 is like in Leopard.



    Hope that helps!
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