I need a good media center application for OS X.

June 22, 2006 7:43 PM

I need a good media center application for OS X.

Currently I'm using MediaCentral, and have tried iTheater and Front Row. However, all of these seem to have their flaws. The biggest problem is the inability to play any ogg vorbis formatted videos.

MediaCentral is the best I've found so far because it can actually follow a link to my external hard drive where I keep all of my videos (allowing me to add videos without having to use an external program). However, it lacks the functionality of a real DVD player (seeking through the video, etc), most of the keyboard controls absolutely don't work, and no ogg vorbis support.

Basically, I want an all-in-one application that can play my MP3s, play video (.ogm included) that I store anywhere on my computer, has useable/senseable controls, and play DVDs. Perhaps one that would allow me to pick my own application for playback (such as VLC).

This really has me at my wit's end, and I'm at the point where I'm seriously considerly writing my own application. Any suggestion?

posted by triolus to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You might try adding the Ogg Vorbis QuickTime Component to the /Library/QuickTime folder, to try to play Ogg Vorbis movie files with Front Row.

After installing the component, just drag the movie file to ~/Movies and start Front Row.

As an example, I've added components that enable Xvid and AC3 support on Intel Macs, so that I can play Xvid-encoded movies in Front Row.
posted by Mr. Six at 8:10 PM on June 22, 2006

slight threadjack... i was thinking of using a mac mini as a home theater PC but my 2GHz macbook (which is faster, and has similar video hardware) wasnt able to keep up with 720p ATSC (hdtv), under mplayer. under VLC as well it was jerky.

this is surprising, as the core duo beats the pants off of even my athlon X2 4200+ on media encoding with mencoder.

any experiences with this?
posted by joeblough at 8:53 PM on June 22, 2006

Are you using the Intel version of VLC for Mac OS X?
posted by Mr. Six at 8:57 PM on June 22, 2006

Thanks for the threadjack. =)

FrontRow is just crap.. the program hangs whenever I go into a folder with a .ogm file (even with the component installed.. thanks for the suggestion Mr. Six), and all of the shows on my external drive just show a black screen for however long the show is.

Since it seems this thread is dead, and there's been no meaningful advice, it looks like I have to make my own solution.
posted by triolus at 10:17 PM on June 22, 2006

I would be very interested in your results triolus. It'd be cool if it had network file sharing capabilities like itunes, but also this program I saw on sourceforge called wombatshare; Nice to have a central "respository" no matter what the source. Good luck in your pursuits!
posted by AllesKlar at 10:25 PM on June 22, 2006

After a quick Google, it looks like OGM is a container just like AVI is. Open one of your OGM files in VLC and see what the stream information tells you about what codecs were used to compress the video.
posted by phrayzee at 2:34 PM on June 23, 2006

RemoteBuddy is vaguely related to this question. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but it could help.
posted by evariste at 4:04 PM on June 23, 2006