At this point, it’s worth revisiting my initial reason for doing this project in the first place and to look at the initial requirements. The point of this project was to have a universal media player that would cover all the basic living room requirements and that, crucially, wouldn’t require lots of button pressing and hoop-jumping to do any one thing.
In other words
- • When switched on, it should default to TV or Music Player, or a very simple menu
- • If defaulting to TV or Music, it should be very simple to get from this to something else
- • putting a CD or a DVD into the drive should either automatically play it, or provide a simple and obvious way to do so
There are obviously other requirements, such as the playing back of ripped DVDs, the use of streaming services and so on, but these three are the most important so were my starting point.
I looked at a few options. Plex and Boxee are both ports of the excellent XBox Media Centre, expandable by an open-source plugin system. They’re both at reasonably early stages of development (Boxee is in alpha, Plex in beta), but neither offers DVD playback yet so I had to count them out for this part of the project. I’ll come back to them in a later post though.
Whilst it has a number of shortcomings1, Apple’s own Front Row application fulfills almost all of my initial requirements; it will play DVDs and Audio CDs without the need to launch other apps, it can access an iTunes Library and shuffle by artist, album or genre and, with Perian installed, it will play any movie file that Quicktime can play all from a menu which is designed to be controlled by the Apple Remote.
Also, with the aid of a plugin called PyeTV, it allows access to EyeTV recordings, a Now/Next Channel Picker and the EyeTV EPG. As a nice little sidenote, it also integrates with ETV-Comskip, an ad-skipper for EyeTV2.
So, by installing PyeTV and adding Front Row to my list of Login Items, the box starts up on Front Row. From here, I can choose to launch EyeTV, listen or watch my iTunes library, or watch a DVD.
1Not least of which, the fact that it doesn’t support iTunes’ “Group Compilations while Browsing” behaviour.
2The 10.5 download link for ETV-Comskip is borked. It will download and unzip a file called “ETVComskip-1.0.3-10.5.dmg.bz2″, but you need to delete the “.bz2″ from the filename in order to mount the disk image.
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