Many Front Row (Leopard edition) problems

Question

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

Answer 1

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?