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There are three alternatives to Front Row: XBMC, Plex and Boxee. Actually, both Plex and Boxee owe their existence to XBMC since they’re based on the open source media content player. My preference had always been Plex but the Boxee crew have just released a new beta. And it, as they say, rocks.

Just as with Plex and XBMC, Boxee will scan your user folder for music, films and TV shows and play them all fullscreen with a slick 10-foot user interface. You can also specify remote servers to stream content to your local system. Boxee version 1 had a strong social network layer to it, which the other two don’t. For my use, I found that distracting and unnecessary. Thankfully, the current beta’s interface has been completely overhauled and the social-centric functions have been tucked away leaving a beautiful and clean interface. Here’s my Home Screen.

I love the simple but quite effective icons for the application’s main functions. Here are the Movies and Music interface screens.

Lovely interface isn’t it? And here’s the Global Menu which lets the user jump between the main functions, application settings and shortcuts.

Boxee also have released Boxee Remote a free iPhone app that controls the interface remotely across the network. The Boxee app also features a gestural interface that has to be seen or tried to be appreciated.

It gets better. Boxee have teamed up with electronics manufacturer D-Link to create the Boxee Box.

This unusually shaped yet attractive media box makes my WDTV look archaic. Aside from the usual HDMI, USB and Optical Audio ports, it has 11n WiFi built-in, an SD card slot and a brilliant RF remote with a full qwerty keyboard. And it’ll retail for less than $200.

Why oh why was this not released before Christmas?

I was a little bit disoriented with Quicktime X, to be honest. What, no export preferences? Only Sharing to iTunes? The UI looks very nice and the promise of GPU-accelerated playback is theoretically good, but what about 1080p MKV files playing natively? Quicktime X doesn’t recognise anything besides MP4 or iTunes’ M4V files. Perian was a constant presence in Leopard but a second-tier citizen with 10.6. Until now!

Thanks to the info in this thread on the cocoa forge board and the latest version of Perian, this utility will let Quicktime X recognise and play .mkv files. Front Row will happily play AVI files (as long as you have Flip4Mac installed) and SD MKV files but not 720p or 1080 movies unfortunately.

Of course, there’s always Plex which plays all movie codecs flawlessly without the need for Perian.

We’ve been using Front Row on my Mac Mini at home for the past couple of years. I’ve had to add lots of codecs to the system, most importantly Perian. Even though it’s a original Core Duo 1.66GHz box it struggled to play 1080i material and completely failed with 1080p. Until Plex, that is.

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