The Mac Media Center Project
It’s just such an irresistible idea. The Mac Mini is too darn cute NOT to belong in your home media system. There
are third-party solutions like Elgato’s EyeTV and EyeHome systems, but wouldn’t it
be great to have a nice, free, open source application to handle the interfacing for your home theatre system
Mac?
There are folks working on porting the MythTV project to OS
X, but setup is still too hairy for the average user. Now there’s a new kid on the block:
The Mac Media Center Project. Its goals are to bring together the
“power and intuitiveness of the Macs’ built in applications under a simple interface, for use as part of a Home Theatre
system.”
Looks like things are just getting underway over there, so if you want to participate in laying the groundwork for the
feature set, hie thyself over to the forums and join in.
Could be an exciting ride.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Martyn Ford said 7:48PM on 12-04-2005
Melbourne Australia, Dec. 1, 2005 --
www.Geniecommands.com, Delivering a complete Programmable Media
Center Solution. Software company Geniecommands today introduced
an exciting new Macintosh software program designed to give consumers
more control and fun over their digital entertainment experiences in
their lounge room.
GenieCommands is a unique programmable software application
that allows you to control all your applications and media via simple
menus, in a theatre or lounge room environment. The Media Center
is a computer like the Mac Mini combined with the Geniecommands software that
provides an all-in-one entertainment system for your entire family.
While attached to your television screen it allows you to enjoy your
favorite entertainment such as; watch DVDs, record TV or pause TV,
listen to music, share your digital photos, access the internet and more
We have provided a complete set of demo menus to get you started,
with links on where to download additional software. These menus
can then be edited to suit your lifestyle or create a new one.
GenieCommands provides a kiosk push button environment
where users can get easier access to the best of what the industry has
to offer in software. This is achieved through simple user defined
graphic menus, to access all the scripts and to control almost any
application.
www.Geniecommands.com
Reply
Rahul Sinha said 8:35AM on 7-20-2005
Actually Elgato's products do NOT add any DRM; you can have the eyeTVs record to quicktime formats, MPEG elementary streams (for DVD studio pro) or (some other format) for use w/ Toast.
Otherwise it saves to bog-standard MPEG2 or 4.
Really, Elgato should be sufficient for anyone's needs. They've even added H.264 encoding!
Once again, EyeTVs will save to literally any format you could want, and add NO DRM in the doing.
-RS
Reply
Jack Beckman said 12:47AM on 7-09-2005
Hmmm...I don't understand why it's such a big deal to have "open source" software for this. You'll have to buy some sort of tuner or input device anyway and they come with software already.
How many of us are going to actually poke around in the source? We just want something that works. Is the software that comes with these things that bad? I have the older USB EyE TV units and it's fine other than the MPEG-1 encoding.
I certainly don't care if people do this, I just fail to see the point.
Reply
Jack said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I think the big push towards Open Source on PVR/DVR software is the natural reaction towards the RIAA/MPAA'sw stifling drive to place Digital Rights Management on every damned thing out there.
I'm sure ElGato does great work. But if we've learned anything from the Napster debacle, it's that if you release any digital software that allows for the copying or ease of circumventing copyrighted material, the lawyers will jump all over you.
Making a PVR/DVR solution that is Open Source allows people to have software that behaves the way it should.
Also, many Open Source UNIX projects allow users on multiple platforms to use many devices that are not explicitly supported on their machine with their machine. I know there's Open Source software that allows the use of some versions of WinTV cards on Macs and Linux boxes. I'll gladly buy the hardware sans the "Mac tax" and support the cool coders who develope Open Source drivers.
Heck, on Macs thanks to the great work the folks who put together PatchBurn have done, many of us have been able to use "non-Apple supported" drives on our machine.
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