I am ashamed, being a Mac lover, to see how much more evolved the Windows world is (especially with Windows7 having built in support for MKV). The media center on windows is SO MUCH MORE advanced that what we have on mac, that I am actually considering switching to it for my media centers at home – and believe me – I don’t want to do that.

But for those of you who are holding on to your Macs (as I’m trying to), Go check Plex and XBMC. That is more along the lines of what a media center is.

Note to Steve Jobs:

- MKV file format is not an option anymore, you don’t have it native, you will die.

- Blu-Ray is NOT a technology of the future. If anything it is a technology of the past but it’s support can’t be optional.

- Front Row is a joke! Look at Windows Media Centers out there.
(and if you decide to give us a REAL media center, give us something that reads the tags of an existing .xml file (like mymovies.xml) NOT something that tries to be intelligent (like Plex) by going out there to find tags and comes back with the wrong ones. Besides, not all of us want to name our files EXACTLY as they need to be named for the online discovery to work.

- Want an edge over windows? Support MKV tags as well as (instead of or in conjunction with) mymovies.xml *AND* folder.jpg and background.jpg.

- Support for multiple folder.jpg(s) per movie and/or background(s).

Oh and one last thing:

- A standalone warning window is not a window that get’s burried behind other windows and becomes impossible to find short of moving all the other windows away! (that is simply RETARTED, at least have it shown with F9). Windows does it best by shading the whole screen and placing that window ON TOP of everything.

- After an app icon has bounced it’s life off for – say 10 seconds, Disable the bouncing. it’s annoying (and embarassing). It happens all the time with Adobe after closing a PDF. We move on doing something else, and the icon decides to start bouncing for NO OTHER REASON, that it has closed the file and is ready?
(I have become a master of Command-Q which sort of defeats the purpose of leaving apps in memory, just because of this annoyance)

Hopefully a port on XBMC will do the trick for me:
http://www.osxbmc.com/

Currently I actually run Microsoft Media Center 2005 via Bootcamp on a Mac mini. I had already managed to get Media Center to play Apple Lossless music, and now I have found Mac OS X tools to play DVR-MS files, and to convert them to standard MPEG2, MPEG4, and iPod friendly H.264 format.

SageTV is being ported to the Mac but there is nothing to see yet.

An alternative to Mezzanine is distantDVD (see http://www.distantdvd.com ) which I feel looks better. However distantDVD has not been upgraded to support 1080p displays

FrontRow will be included as standard in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for all Macs and it is likely it will get some new features at the same time. I think it unlikely it will get full-blown DVR capabilities but there is a small possibility Apple will open things up to enable companies like Elgato and Equinux to work with it (better).

I think Elgato and Equinux need to work together more (they have already done some collaboration). EyeTV should handle the TV recording and playback, and Equinux, DVD, music, photos, videos, games, weather, etc., i.e. everything else. By working together they could integrate their software even more.

This site may also be of interest. http://www.pure-mac.com/mediacenter.html

http://www.mezzanineapp.com

One other thing, if you have kids, having all their DVDs ripped on to a hard disk is a truly beautiful thing.

There is nothing wrong with digging your own stuff either.

How do? Try: http://andrewescobar.com/frontrow

Edited.