Update: Matt Hansson has written a more up-to-date overview of the offerings. His findings: He still prefers Mediaportal on Windows to the currently available Mac solutions. Damn.
We’ve recently set up a home entertainment centre, consisting of a 40″ Samsung LCD TV, a Yamaha 6.1 audio setup and a Mac Mini.
In order to drive it all, I was after a full-screen media center suite (movies, music, DVD, etc), to hide the fact that it’s a computer – we don’t wanna see that muck!
It had to have a high usability, and a high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor…Actually, partner, but you know), which means no hardcore key combinations, or dropping to terminal to kill -9 anything. I’m looking at you, Xhub.
It had to be relatively fast – no waiting around for five minutes for the music library to appear.
…And it had to offer some moderately easy way to share screen-time with EyeTV, the digital TV viewer/recorder.
So here were the options, with my summary of each.
Front Row
The easiest choice, as it’s essentially built in (although I had to use enabler as it’s an older mini). Pretty, and well integrated.
However, it requires a apple-escape to get into it every time, and once you’re in you can’t switch out without getting all the way out. No easy switching to EyeTV – you gotta get out of Front Row, click or alt-tab to EyeTV, then apple-escape to enter EyeTV’s fullscreen menu. Then to get back into Front Row, you have to click on Finder or something, as EyeTV steals Front Row’s keyboard combo. Yuck.
Front Row is also extremely sluggish, especially when browsing through videos, as it has to load each one under the cursor for a video thumbnail. On the poor 1.25 Ghz PPC mini, this is unusable.
iTheater
iTheater is free, which is a good price. Very, very fast interface, and easy to switch to/from with alt-tab – no screen-hogging. That meant it was easy to integrate with EyeTV – with Quicksilver, I set up F1 to activate EyeTV; F2 activated iTheater again.
Unfortunately, after getting the 40″ LCD (running at 1200×768), iTheater suddenly couldn’t play videos at full framerate – they were hideously jerky. On the 1.25Ghz PPC processor, it really should’ve done better. Quicktime and Mplayer handled the video fine, so I could see no excuse for iTheater.
Out it went.
CenterStage
CenterStage for me was a failure right from the start.
I installed it on both my MacBook Pro and the Mini, and it didn’t even launch on either. I read on, and found that lots of other people had the same problem.
Not immensely impressive…
Moving on!
MediaCentral
MediaCentral looked promising. It started up very slowly, but that’s a once-off. It ran ridiculously slowly, though – until I read somewhere that someone turned off the online content setting, and sped it up. Sure enough, the menus started behaving themselves better.
It offered an in-built digital TV module, but that interfered with EyeTV. Turned off, I could have probably done the Quicksilver trick with F1 and F2 again.
All was looking good until I actually tried to play a video – it was the slowest of the lot. Very jerky playback, and broken up audio.
Terrible. Next!
mMedia
Ah, mMedia…Dysfunctional to the extreme.
The menus didn’t even work, and it was quite ugly. There wasn’t a chance it was going to work for me.
GenieCommands
Not entirely sure why this one is even listed as…well, anything.
GenieCommands looks like it was made in Powerpoint or something.
It’s meant to be a remote control application to control all the other apps, but it works appallingly.
Clicking (no keyboard) on iTunes brought up iTunes in the foreground, for example.
I can’t believe this is for sale! (For $20 USD, too).
XHub
And now we come to Xhub. Fast and pretty, with plenty of customizability in its looks. It behaves as a front-end to other apps, and integrates relatively well with DVD Player, iTunes, and iPhoto. Video playback is acceptable, and happens at the full frame-rate with a customised mplayer. Best of all, it offers an integrated front-end to EyeTV.
In theory, it sounds perfect. In practice, it falls short – it’s extremely buggy, crashing every second or third time I go to play something. A force-quit with cmd-option-q restores the desktop, ready for a relaunch back in, hopefully for greater success the next time.
When it isn’t crashing, it’s losing keyboard focus, unfortunately – often I’ve had to go through a sequence of force-quitting to get the keyboard back after starting a video. The same thing happens with EyeTV, and it also changes the keyboard commands – no more jumping 10 seconds back/forward with the arrow keys – you have to hold down the keys now to rewind or fast forward at 4x. That means a minute or so of holding down the right arrow to skip ad breaks.
Summary
So, amazingly, there are no good media center applications for Mac OS X that I’ve found. They’re all buggy (at best) in their own ways. Perhaps if I had a faster machine MediaCentral or iTheater would be viable, but it’s insane that they require more power.
It looks like I’m sticking with Xhub for now, because at least it comes close to doing what I want, unlike any of the others. Although it crashes constantly, I don’t have to reach for the mouse or terminal to remedy the situation – it brings up a dialog after force-quitting asking if you want to relaunch. Then it’s just the cmd-option-enter hotkey to relaunch and try again.
Lets hope these applications develop!
Hi!
I use Remote Buddy as my Media Center App. It is not perfect, but for 10 Bucks it´s great for everything I do. Try it, maybe you like it. Greetings, eike
XHub 2 is out. Seems very fast and stable. No crashes for me so far. I really like the way I can customise everything. Love the interface and EyeTV integration.
XHub Media Center: http://www.snarb.tk
Great! I downloaded it and had a play, couldn’t get it to play the first couple of fairly standard-looking files I tried, then uninstalled it again =) Perhaps there’s something wrong with the machine I tried it on…
You need codecs to play non-standard QuckTime files. I use Perian. It handles most video encodings: http://perian.org
What a great piece of software it is too – unfortunately I already had it installed =)
Maybe I’ll give it another try some time.
if you can over look the lack of live TV (for now), PLEX looks the goods.
I just had a look at Plex – it looks very pretty, but smells like immature open source, unfortunately.. Very tricky to use, I couldn’t make the ‘Library’ feature, one of Plex’s main selling points, do anything at all. Set up my sources, and followed the docs (which I actually needed to read, never a good thing), and still got told that there was nothing there. Boo!
really? ive just had a brief hack at it and found it really impressive.
but i do agree with you that its more complex than i needs to be.
By immature to you mean poorly designed or buggy? Because i was able to add sources and get imdb info all with the little apple remote, which i thought was quite impressive.
The setup is a tad daunting and way more complex than anything ive experienced since moving to Apple but its nothing on the crap that ive seen in the Windows camp! Have a look at Media Portal. You would never know that such an ugly and complex piece of software has its origins in the same place as PLEX.
Ive only just found PLEX today also and it shows a lot of promise for when Apple release the next gen Mac Mini which will replace my Windows MCE machine.
Oh, glad to hear you got it working! Perhaps it needs a little more elbow grease. I could forgive it the troublesome setup if it worked well afterwards. I just haven’t got that far yet – I add my media drive to the sources, then view the library, restarting the app once or twice after nothing happens… But still nothing: “No scanned information for this view. Switch to the Files view”. Bleh, says I.
yeah i know what you mean though.
im willing to give it a hack as the titles i did setup look stunning and i think it could be worth the effort.
i really want this PLEX to work. im sick of my PC just being crap and having to rebuild it every 6 months just to get it back to basic functionality.
ill let you know how i go. after all i gotta look out for my fellow melburnians! ;)
Great post Michael, I just found this a little bit too late, though. The good side about it is that I just freshly re-evaluated e.g. XHub, Eyetv3, etc. and looked at some other options for Mac Mini outside OS X as well at http://www.gamaze.com/blog/?p=64
Thanks for the reviews Michael. I would suggest looking into Boxee. It is a phenominal program. I wish it worked on PowerPC G5, but alas Intel online. It is a great program and really fast. http://www.boxee.tv/homepage/
Great to have Mac OS X media center software.