Is Front Row Operating ...

Hi, I am considering purchasing a Mac Mini. I would be using it as a Media Server mainly with FrontRow iTunes Videos and occasionly a tv tuner. Should I get a Core Solo or Core Duo? Thanks.

There is no reason to assume that thermal management is implemented the same way for the core duo and the core solo. My notebook for example uses CPU, GPU and harddisk temperature for fan control, it is in no way obvious how these temperatures translate into a fan speed. A number of settings stored in an NVRAM may influence the behavior as well!
The temperature of the GPU will not only depend on the task itself but also on the resolution of the attached device which in turn determines the dot clock rate and the power consumption.
My core duo does make noise and the noise increases during playback of an MPEG stream. The same is true for my notebook, and there I actually can readout the temperature of the GPU and the temperature increases significantly during playback.
All recent processors (CPU and GPU) are designed for low power, yet without cooling they would overheat within a few minutes.
Mario
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.6) Core Duo / 2GB

Similar Messages

Front Row on mac mini: We need some fixes

Been having fun playing with my mac mini and trying it out as a home media center, to network and play all my shared media that's on my iMac G5 and enjoy it on my 32" LCD TV and stereo system.
There are three major glitches that keep this from working perfectly, and hopefully Apple will have a fix for these soon:
1. When you want to view your shared pics as a slideshow, Front Row is not able to remember and use the music settings that you have assigned to your albums in iPhoto. It can only use music for the slideshows that originates on the mini. There is no choosing from the Shared Music in the slideshow preferences, and therefore no option to, like on an iPod, to have your slideshow music setting set to "From iPhoto".
2. Front Row keeps insisiting and changing even saved settings for slideshow playaback, always reverting back to using Jesu Joy...from the Sample Music folder, and displaying images with the Ken Burns effect. I have tried changing these setting on both computers's iPhoto settings, and yet Front Row resets them, if not immediately, upon the next opening.
3. I cannot get any movie that I did not purchase off of iTunes to play through the networked connection. It seems that it cannot stream anything much longer or bigger than an iPod sized music video or movie trailer. I couldn't even get the TV show episodes I have in iTunes to work. Trying to play a full length movie resulted in FrontRow hanging forever and me having to Force Quit or restart. Many of the full length movies I had ripped from DVDs to mp4s I did at a larger size than the 320 iPod screen size, so that when I played them back on a large display they would look better. These movies are formatted right and do play in iTunes as well as on my iPod, and from my iPod to TV with the AV cables, but not through the wireless networked mac mini.
If we can get these things straightened out, it is a pretty great home media device.

Jim,
Isn't Front Row awesome and full of promise! I just needed a new mini and got this to play with in the mix. Looks like I need two mini since this one is going under the TV.
Now to your glitches. Remember front row is simply an agent that listens for remote commands and sends them to other applications to do the heavy lifting/dirty work.
1. I think this is really a problem with the version of iPhoto that has the photos. I'm not a guru of iPhoto, but I know of no way to change the defaults for a new slideshow. All the shows I create (either in iPhoto or via front row requesting a slide show on the fly) initially default to Automatic Ken Burns and the Jesu.... soundtrack ( a great piece of music no doubt, but woefully overplayed at the moment for my tastes.) I have no problems once I go into iPhoto and set the slide show prefernces the way I like and quit/re-start iPhoto. I don't know if there is another way to save the settings for a slide show, but quitting seems to do the trick for me.
2. I'm not catching anything new here. Are you sure your settings were saved - (i.e. could you start iPhoto on "source" computer and play the slide show immediately and get the music and settings you changed?) Sorry to question you but I just can't think anything else here. Front row is simply asking iTunes (either locally or remotely) to play the show or create one if it does not exist. Perhaps the way it is asking is different for you - I have a weird mix of software levels (iPhoto 5 on my remote mac and iPhoto 6 on my mini) - but I cannot reproduce the symptom you mentioned to try to see what happened.
3. This could be a network issue (or a too much stuff to fit in the sock.) What is the data rate for one of the movies that causes you issues? Is that rate more than your network will allow? Front Row doesn't seem to be that graceful at the moment when network pauses or fails. It will wait a long time to time out the operation and I get to watch that circular throbber a lot. Open up the Activity Monitor (it's in Applications / Utilities folder). Play the movie locally from a hard disk. Look at the Disk Activity tab at the bottom. It will give you an idea of how much data needs to be read from disk to play the movie. Then change to the network tab. Go to the other computer and play the movie. Return to the first computer and see how much data manages to get sent. (It's best to quit all other applications when measuring - this tool shows all activity on the mac - not just the movie...) I have a lot of movies that have way too much data to send wirelessly. I'm going to upgrade my home switch to gigabit and wire things to that to serve my needs.
Good luck - let me know if I misunderstood anything - but I'm guessing front row already does what you want and there are some workarounds or other issues of learning how to set things up to give you that pretty great home media device you want.

Front Row Update

When wil front row be updated, it was ok when iTunes first started to sell movies and TV shows but now libraries are reaching hundreds of gigabytes and hundreds of movies navigating through them all is becoming quite difficult. Is there anything that can change this, i still want to just press menu on the remote as i use my mac mini as a media centre.
It would be nice if apple could update what i think is an integral part of the operating system, especially when they are trying to sell HD movies and TV shows.

My general strategy on this was to create a folder Categories and beneath
this make subfolders which each of the movie categories I cared about.
I put a short cut to this folder in my Movies folder. Then for each movie I had
I created a short-cut and placed it into the category I feel the movie belongs to.
If it belongs to more than one category I create more than one short cut.
In Front Row if I then go to Movies > Movies Folder I see my Categories folder and I can navigate to movies that way.

Front row video doesnt work any more....

After around two months of complete operation front row now doesnt play videos, when selected i get the following message:
'YOu dont have any movie files in the movies folder in your home folder'
In the finder window, the little blue movie icon isnt there anymore, instead theres just a normal blue file.
Think i need to get the blue movie icon back in the finder window.
Anyideas how i can get this back?
ta

Did you rename or move your "Movies" folder?
If you have your user home directory in the sidebar (far left hand side of the finder window that looks like a house), click on that.
Do you see a folder named "Movies"? If you do, is there anything inside it?
If you accidently renamed it or moved it out of your home directory, Front Row won't be able to find your movies.

Front Row & Video Podcast Play Count

I have one of the new Core Duo 20" iMacs. I've found that Front Row does something unexepected. When I watch a video podcast through Front Row, and I mean watch it to the end of the file, the play count in iTunes is not updated. I've checked, and the count is updated for music files and audio podcasts. This only seems to happen with video podcasts. Any else having this problem? Solutions?
I suspect it's happening because audio is probably played through iTunes, whereas the video is Quicktime.
Thanks in advance,
J

I don't haven't used Front Row to play movies or video - but the problem you are describing has been happening in both Quicktime and iTunes on my Mac, ever since I installed Leopard. There are a few things I've tried that work to get the video and audio back in sync - one is to pause the video, and to leave it paused for 5 or 10 minutes. When I come back and restart it, sometimes it will play normally. The other thing that I've tried is to actually shut down iTunes and restart it - for some reason that works a bit more consistently.
Another problem I have is less dire - and that is occasionally a video or movie will lose its audio altogether - when that happens the "fix" is to stop the video for a few seconds, then restart it. It usually works. Again, the operative word is usually. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to stop this from happening at all - which is what I'd prefer, but these fixes (and sometimes a combination of them) will get me through a movie. I'd love some guidance from the home office on this though! Anyone at Apple care to take a bite?

Front row track listing

Is there any way to configure Front Row to ignore ID3 tags and sort my music by directory hierarchy? I keep all my media in an NFS share on another machine, and I have been sorting my MP3 files this way for years, very few of them even have id3 tags and this makes it difficult to find anything using front row. I managed to do this with videos by making a symbolic link to the NFS share in ~/Movies, but it doesn't seem to work the same way for music. Any help would be appriciated.

Doug's script worked, as I thought it might, but I am also continuing to pursue an "official" solution from Apple, because i absolutely HATE it when a company is aware of a problem, but refuses to officially acknowledge it and offer a solution.
The first thing out of the support engineer's mouth after we spoke about the problem, was "I'll escalate this to our applications group, but we really don't support TV Show content other than those you download from the Apple Store, and Front Row is kind of a dead issue now that Lion is out." And I was like, "Huh? What about the hundreds of thousands of people who do NOT upgrade to Lion and who RELY on Front Row as a key component of our media management and usage solution?" He didn't have an answer and I didn't really expect that he would. Apple doesn't give a crap about it's customers, any more than ANY big company does. Once they have your money, the love affair is over. Reading these forums and other online Apple support discussions, so many people had no idea that they would LOSE Front Row by upgrading to Lion. I can't believe that Apple would kill off something that is clearly providing value to so many customers - especially without offering an alternative (i.e., Front Row is dead, but you can use Orchestra Center" (or whatever) to get the same functionality, with these enhancements).
Someone very much smarter than me coined the phrase "Sales makes friends, but Service keeps them!" Definitely not something that Apple is using as an operating paradigm. Apple only loves you if you get on the money wagon and keep buying the new sh*t!

Front Row is listing particular TV Shows as Movies, even though the "Type" attribute is correctly set to "TV Show" in iTunes.

Here's the whole story:
My friend gave me access to a whole season of one of my favorite TV shows, with all the commericals removed! Lucky me! I imported them into iTunes using File, Add To Library, and at first they all showed up in Movies. I then edited the file info to add episode title, number, season, date, rating - all the metadata - and then iTunes successfully moved the episodes from Movies to TV Shows. HOwever, Front Row is STILL listing these episodes (and ONLY these episodes) under Movies AS WELL AS TV Shows!
I have tried Consolidating the files (no effect), eidting all the "Get Info" data again to force an update (no effect), and I even went so far as to locate the episode files in Finder (they are corectly located under TV Shows, and NOT Movies), and then I manually selected the file, hit "Get Info", and changed the associated application from Quicktime to iTunes (the file extension is MP4 for all these episodes). This also had no effect on the problem.
The files play equally well from either Movies or TV Shows, but that is besides the point. I cannot find documentation on WHERE Front Row stores it's data and/or how I can "force" Front Row to update it's information so it is accurate. I have toggled iTunes open and closed, Shutdown and Restarted the machine and even run Disk Utility to make sure the permissions are all okay - and they are. None of this has any effect on the problem, which persists.
I am at my wits end with this problem. I have loggged a hardware issue with Apple over it, and they are due to phone me tomorrow, but if anyone has a quick and easy solution to this issue that DOESN'T involve deleting and reimporting all my movies, which really shouldn't be necessary, I'd love to have your feedback and assistance. We pay upwards of $1,000 and then some for these confounded machines, they should not require 'work arounds' - applications provided with the OS should be documented and supported!
Thanks for your help!

Doug's script worked, as I thought it might, but I am also continuing to pursue an "official" solution from Apple, because i absolutely HATE it when a company is aware of a problem, but refuses to officially acknowledge it and offer a solution.
The first thing out of the support engineer's mouth after we spoke about the problem, was "I'll escalate this to our applications group, but we really don't support TV Show content other than those you download from the Apple Store, and Front Row is kind of a dead issue now that Lion is out." And I was like, "Huh? What about the hundreds of thousands of people who do NOT upgrade to Lion and who RELY on Front Row as a key component of our media management and usage solution?" He didn't have an answer and I didn't really expect that he would. Apple doesn't give a crap about it's customers, any more than ANY big company does. Once they have your money, the love affair is over. Reading these forums and other online Apple support discussions, so many people had no idea that they would LOSE Front Row by upgrading to Lion. I can't believe that Apple would kill off something that is clearly providing value to so many customers - especially without offering an alternative (i.e., Front Row is dead, but you can use Orchestra Center" (or whatever) to get the same functionality, with these enhancements).
Someone very much smarter than me coined the phrase "Sales makes friends, but Service keeps them!" Definitely not something that Apple is using as an operating paradigm. Apple only loves you if you get on the money wagon and keep buying the new sh*t!

Front Row Gradient

Has anyone else noticed that black/white the gradient on Front Row doesn't look that great? Instead of being a smooth gradient, you can see the individual lines with different shades of black and white. It looks ok when you are operating Front Row farther away from the computer, but when you get close it is kind of a turn off. Could the gradient be better or are they all like this?
Any replies are greatly appreciated.
Thank You.

Nobody Replied so I closed this topic

Front Row - Did the 10.6.3 update break keyboard control?!

So, I came across an odd problem today when helping a friend get her data moved from an old iBook G4 onto a new MacBook Pro 2.66GHz. I walked her through setting up the Migration Assistant while on the phone and drove over to help her install some new software. When I got there, she said she was exploring some of the new apps and Front Row looked like it had frozen on her. It wouldn't respond to the arrow keys, Return, or even Command-Escape. Force-quitting via Command-Opt-Esc worked though. I opened Front Row again, and the same thing happened. For kicks, I grabbed my Apple Remote from my backpack and tried it... it seemed to have control just fine, but the keyboard still didn't. Baffled, I told her I'd look into it more later.
When I got home, I tried it on my MBP 2.53GHz and... low and behold... keyboard control wouldn't work on my machine either! I find this very strange because less than a month ago under 10.6.2 (I held out on 10.6.3 for quite a while... was just lazy, I admit) I KNOW I had full control without needing any Apple Remote to do it! I used it for photo slideshows, movies, and quicktime trailers with NO PROBLEM at all. Now, suddenly, under 10.6.3, I can't use Front Row without an Apple Remote?! What gives??
Am I being stupid or blind to some simple setting somewhere, or did Front Row seriously take a change for the worse and disable keyboard control?? If anyone else can chime in here, it would be most appreciated, particularly if you know of a way to help me regain control like I had before without needing an Apple Remote. (For a computer that sits less than two feet away from me, this is a real annoyance!) Thanks for the help!

I have tried that now, but still the same and now my wi-fi printer has stopped working - it is in the print and scan folder and showing as idle but when I send something to print it appears in the folder but does not print. This too was working fine before the update.
I am afraid as a newbie Mac person all this is just far too much for me. After spending £1500 on a machine only 4 days ago, over £50 on books from Amazon to make sure I learn about the Snow Leopard OS X platform, I do not expect to have these issues from just a simple update. When I wanted to turn back the system to 10.6.2 Apple Care told me I have to re-load the iMac operating system to put it back into its original state - on a pc you would just have to do system restore and the whole thing would have been corrected in 5 minutes whilst I waited for all the apparent issues to be resolved relating to the current update.
I have packed it and today it is going back to the shop - sorry I really tried but this experience is just too much for me - but thanks for all your help.

The front row is not working. Remote control not triger,

Front row is not working, Remote control no response, command-esc not triger as well.
check keyboard shortcut from system preference, there is no front row.
anyone know why?

Ok first try it in another Account.
1. Open the account system pref window (System Preferences > Accounts)
2. Click the plus button at the bottom
3. Specify an account name (ex: test)
4. Add account
5. Logout of your current account, and login to the newly created one
If it works, then something was wrong with your account, move your files to the new account, and delete the old one.
If it did not work:
1. Try the reinstall again (DO NOT DO "ARCHIVE AND REINSTALL", as this may keep some file that is hindering FR from operating correctly
2. Make sure the FR file is in the Core Services Folder (Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app)
3. Make sure that you do not have the IR sensor turned off on your computer (System Prefs > Security > Uncheck "Disable Remote Control IR Sensor")
4. Make sure that your remote is paired (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302545)
5. Make sure that the Command + Esc key is setup to respond by opening front row:
(1) Open system prefs
(2) Open keyboard & mouse prefs
(3) Click keyboard shortcuts
(4) Scroll down until you see front row
(5) Assign the Command + Esc key if it is not mapped
6. Finally, if all else fails, call AppleCare while your computer is still under warranty
Hope this helps,
Cory

How do I keep the screen from dimming in Front Row DVD Player

Nothing against the standard DVD Player program, but when I'm using the remote Front Row has more functionality. When I use it plugged in, there is no problem, but on battery power the screen auto-dims like normal and then brightens again and dims again...on and on. It proves to be very distracting.
Is there any way anybody knows to keep the screen from dimming like that while im in front row DVD player?
Newmac

Go to System Preferences > Energy Saver and change the time for screen dim in your prefs for battery operation. You can always change the setting back to the existing setting later, if you like.

Front Row 2.0 and video files stored in iPhoto Library

When i play a photo slideshow in front row 2.0 (don't remember how it was under frant row 1.0), the videos imported besides still pictures in my iPhoto library aren't played, and not even showed as low res thumbnails (as it does when playing a slideshow from iPhoto ; well, i'm not so sure now i write it). Instead, you only have a black screen as long as the duration of the movie !
Would be nice if Front Row could play movie files imported in the iPhoto Library ... or, at least, skip them !
At the present time, i will be forced to remove movie files from my iPhoto and export them to my videos folder... (one more operation to execute manually when importing photos from my p&s camera via iphoto)
Message was edited by: Gavroche1973
Message was edited by: Gavroche1973

Organizing related files with Smart Folders
This also applies for 10.5 Leopard.
If you open Automator (Applications) and choose Library >> Files and folders >> Find Finder items and draw it to the right side of the window. Now you can search the whole computer or just your user folder for example (from the drop down menu). Then you can make further adjustments like find .avi (look at the image)
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/kimi/automator_alias.png
Then you draw the new aliases to the window and choose what folder it saves the aliases too, in my case my Movies-folder (Elokuvat is Movies in finnish). After that you press Run and it saves the aliases. Easy!
The original files are still located inside the iPhoto Library and the Movies-folder just contains the aliases.

Front Row & movies

I loaded up the movies folder with some QT movies, .dv movies, mpeg4 movies etc, about 10 differnt movies in all. I activated FR with my remote, went to the movies section worked over the movies and the little icon just spins & spins. I force-quit FW took some movies out of the movie folder and same result. Finally, I left 1 movie in the folder & FW played it. Is this a ram issue? Apple Chat web support said it might have to do with my user account, multiple accounts?

You know, I thought, just for the heck of it, I decided to perform a clean install of the OS & start fresh. After the install I loaded my movies into the iTunes video section. I dragged my movies in one by one just to see if iTunes would accept & import each one. It would not accept 2 of them - A-HA! After that procedure I repaired permissions (which you should do after every software install?) I then fired up Front Row & everthing worked as it should. I put it through its paces in all sections and it performed beautifully. I am very happy, it seems most times that I have a problem with Apple software, it's usually operator error. LOL.

Mac mini and Front Row - entertainment center

I plan to use a mac mini as a replacement for my CD jukebox and DVD player in my entertainment center. I have everything, including the HD cable box through the Yamaha receiver - what am I going to need to make this work? Router, etc??? Does Front Row just play media or do I use it to rip CD's - or is that Itunes?
Thanks, Just getting in to the mac and really like the operating system much more than Windows DME.

I did the same thing about a month ago, but we loved the Mac Mini so much more than our PC that I moved it to my desk and it's now my main PC. I plan on checking out the iTV like the previous post stated when it comes out too.
But, back to your question . . . Depending on what kind of TV you have, you may need an adaptor. For an HD widescreen TV, you can connect direct DVI if your TV has the connector, or you can get a DVI to HDMI cable (about $110) to go to an HDMI connection. I'm not aware that there are converters for composite video. For digital audio, you should get the mini to optical toslink converter. They sell it on the Apple store. I couldn't find one at Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, or my local Apple store, but got one at a Re-Mac store. I recommend just buying it online. If you have music already imported to iTunes on a PC or another Mac, you can stream it to the Mac Mini on a wireless network. If you don't have one, you'll need a wireless router. Wireless G is the standard and works great. N is the new standard coming out, but unless you'll be streaming video over the network, it's overkill. The mini will easily hook right up to it once your network router is turned on and you've named your network. You can play iTunes songs and playlists from the other computer through Front Row as long as you have the music sharing option turned on in iTunes (PC or Mac) on the computer that holds the music. If you're just going to have the music on the Mac mini, none of the wireless shareing is necessary.
On your last question, Front Row doesn't rip CDs, but you just rip the CDs into iTunes and then Front Row will automatically see any music or playlists from iTunes. Front Row is basically just putting window dressing on iTunes for music. In fact, you can see after closing Front Row, that the little black arrow is under the iTunes icon on your dock meaning that it is open (even if you didn't open it before).
One last note, the mini won't work as a PVR unless you buy an external device to work as a TV tuner. You can search the discussions on Mac Mini to find a lot of posts for recommendations on how to do that.
I've been combing these discussion boards for the last month learning everything I need to know about the Mac. They're great for any other questions you have. Good luck!
Mac Mini 1.83 Intel Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Many Front Row (Leopard edition) problems

Front Row Leopard problems:
Won't launch if screensaver is active.
Video won't display time-remaining, and many video types won't remember position and resume, Tiger's Front Row could remember position of any video type!
Doesn't play podcasts from playlists. This is ridiculous, I have many podcast only and audiobook only playlists both Smart and Regular playlists where I store things that I want to later refer back to, but FR just won't recognize them.
Playback stops when you leave a submenu. For example if you're listening to a podcast you can back out to the podcasts menus and look at other podcasts while listening, but if you go to the main menu playback stops. I like to look at other items while listening to decide what to play next, be it an audiobook, some music, or a video. In Front Row-Tiger you could easily do this, even watch video preview thumbnails, even my iPod Nano lets you hop around while still listening.
Playback stops when you leave Front Row. Under Tiger you could exit Front Row while still listening. Is quite handy if you remember you need to fire off an email you don't have to stop your media and even worse find it again when you want to continue.
And lastly, I don't like the new movie-trailer setup. I much prefer seeing thumbnails of movie posters. It's much easier and quicker to navigate that way, and prettier too, it's much more Mac like (in my opinion.)
These issues are so horrible that I tried to revert to the old Front Row, with no luck sigh.
Any chance future revisions will solve these issues or should I begin looking for a new media center app?
Mark

I don't haven't used Front Row to play movies or video - but the problem you are describing has been happening in both Quicktime and iTunes on my Mac, ever since I installed Leopard. There are a few things I've tried that work to get the video and audio back in sync - one is to pause the video, and to leave it paused for 5 or 10 minutes. When I come back and restart it, sometimes it will play normally. The other thing that I've tried is to actually shut down iTunes and restart it - for some reason that works a bit more consistently.
Another problem I have is less dire - and that is occasionally a video or movie will lose its audio altogether - when that happens the "fix" is to stop the video for a few seconds, then restart it. It usually works. Again, the operative word is usually. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to stop this from happening at all - which is what I'd prefer, but these fixes (and sometimes a combination of them) will get me through a movie. I'd love some guidance from the home office on this though! Anyone at Apple care to take a bite?

Is Front Row Operating ...

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for