Has Apple answered all your needs with the Apple TV? Do you have an HTPC running Windows in your living room instead? Let me know what you think. It just seems nuts to me that you'd have what is arguably an almost perfect media center or home theater PC - the Mac mini - and you'd offer no software to enable that functionality. The latter case can make a big difference if you're on a metered Internet service, as many of us are.Īnd if the mood strikes you to play games, you can't do that on a streaming media box, while it's trivial with a Mac (add Steam's "Big Picture" feature and you're cruising). What's more, you're not streaming content over your Wi-Fi network or, if you're using iTunes in the Cloud, over the Internet. Meanwhile a Mac equipped as a media center allows you to access any streaming content from the Internet that will run on your Mac, rather than only the streaming content that is available through one of the apps that runs on the Apple TV. That limitation is gone with a Mac acting as a media center. VoiceOver Compatible Apps for Apple iPhone and Mac. While you can stream Amazon Prime video content from an iOS device to an Apple TV using AirPlay, there's no native Amazon Prime app for the Apple TV. They're only as good as the apps they work with, or the apps that are built in.Īpple TV is a good case in point. As Steve Jobs once said, "Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." Apple TV isn't all thatĪpple TV, Roku and Chromecast all have their place at the home theater table, but none of them have quite the same flexibility as a Mac equipped with media center abilities. There's the open-source app XBMC, for example, or Plex, a commercial app that was once based on the XBMC core, and MediaCentral from Equinux.Īll of these have their place, but installation and setup isn't trivial. It introduced the Launchpad and was originally only. Since Front Row is no longer available, Mac owners interested in using their computer as a media center have a few third-party options. This version dropped support for the x86 userland and architecture and removed Rosetta and Front Row. You also have to have a seamless and easy way of accessing the content on the Mac, and that's the domain of media center software. With the ready availability of Macs that can connect, and cheaper-than-ever HDTVs, it's a bit nuts for Apple to leave the Mac out of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) equation.īut setting up a Mac as a media center is more than just plugging it in to a TV. Not just Mac minis, but Retina MacBook Pros and even the mighty Mac Pro can manage HDTV connections natively iMacs and other MacBooks can hook up trivially using a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter. If(!(my.target.mountpoint + "/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.More Macs than ever before include HDMI cables to connect to flat-panel HDTVs. The solution was analogue to what is described above: in the same file, a couple of lines beneath, there is the following code: At first, I couldn't install it to my hard drive in spite of this hint, because front row was not yet installed (and this download from apple is labelled as an update). I had to tweak a little more to get things running, though:Ģ. Navigate to your desktop, or wherever you copied FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg to, and double-click FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg - it should now install. Quit TextEdit and select Save when prompted. My.ssage = system.localizedStringWithFormat('ERROR_MODEL') Ĭhange the if line to remove the !, like so: When the file is open, scroll down to around line 39 which should read something like: from the pop-up menu, and then navigate to and select TextEdit from the resulting file dialog. To do this, simply Control-click on the file and select Open With > Other. Navigate into the Contents folder and open the file FrontRowUpdate1.3.dist using TextEdit. Control-click FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. If you're have any doubts then don't do it!.ĭownload the disk image (which can be downloaded from the Front Row update page), open it, drag the file named FrontRowUpdate1.3.pkg onto your desktop (or other preferred location) and then, once the file has copied, eject the disk image. Seriously: this worked on my iMac G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.7, but I give no guarantees that it'll work on whatever set-up you have. I accept no responsibility for damage to any other software installed on your computer, damage to the computer itself, or damage to the brickwork of your house. The recent Front Row update wouldn't install on my iMac G4 (unsurprisingly) resulting in an error: "This software update requires a Macintosh with a built-in infrared (IR) receiver running Mac OS X 10.4.5 or later." I set out to change that.ĭISCLAIMER: Following these instructions and/or installing Front Row on a Mac that isn't officially supported by Apple for such purposes is done entirely at your own risk.
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