It’s been just over two months since our little radio station went dark. And obviously I had not posted online in the same time either, but as you can see we have changed the website/content system over to WordPress. We did this in preparation for a podcast of some sort. But more to come with that later. What have you been up to during the last 60 days? Happy Holidays to All! In the next few days, with a few different blog posts, I hope to bring everyone up-t0-date with our most current experiments and adventures.

FrontRow
After retrieving our broadcast server from Mia.net in late October, I set about to back-up and preserve our entire on-air library. You never know when you might get a call from one of the satellite radio companies asking us to be one of their channels! ;-D After back-up was complete I was prepared to create a new Mac oriented entertainment machine, using their FrontRow software as the front end.

For the Mac geeks out there, 80s Airwaves WAS running off a B&W G3, which I updated to a G4 800 thanks to the folks at Sonnet. It still had the original combo drive that could play DVDs and record CDs, but what good does that do these days? I found a cool eBay store, called WeFixMacs; they sell SuperDrives, some with the Apple firmware already installed. Just $56 and 20 minutes later, I had pulled the old drive and installed the new one capable of 8X DVD burns.

Next, up I had to pull the 60GB drive that held our on-air music library and I wanted to replace it with dual drives with a much larger capacity. A friend warned me about maximum storage sizes with ATA100 systems (not to exceed 128GB) so I ended up with two brand new 120GB Seagate drives (also from eBay for $50 each). I’m fairly certain someone got up early and went to Staples and got these for $20 during a Black Friday sale, but that’s okay. I can’t believe how cheap storage has gotten these days. Again, with a quick google on setting the jumpers for dual drives and a B&W, I had the old drive out and a new dual drive sled installed and tested within an hour.

A week or two later I had both a Tiger (OSX 10.4) install DVD and FrontRow. Initially I created three partitions from the two drives, but after a preliminary install it seemed fairly evident that some of the FrontRow apps would not allow you to relocate your library of content like iTunes does. So I reformmatted for a simple dual drive system and things were looking good. I used an app called SwitchResX ($15) to drive the proper video signal to our 46″ Samsung DLP TV (via RGB).

Now the challenge here is that as of today, FrontRow ONLY comes installed with the latest iMacs (the ones with the built-in iSight camera & remote). It seems clear that this restriction will change, probably next month at the next big Apple shindig, but for those of us who want to experiment we are forced to track down hacked versions of this application with special install instructions. FrontRow can be downloaded for free from the Apple website but the normal Apple installer checks to see if its being installed on a new iMac. Well, as you can see from the photo, the hack mostly works - aside from the inverted text of course.

What’s the big deal about FrontRow you ask?
After many years of building important “i” applications, like iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and more, with the release of FrontRow Apple has now created a SIMPLE means that allows anyone to use their Mac as a real entertainment device. FrontRow will be the glue that pulls all of these applications, plus many Dashboard widgets, into a new simple operating system. Instead of a mouse, we now have a remote (which they are already selling separately through their store) that allows you to connect your Mac to your TV and audio system to enjoy your music, movies, videos and more. Built into FrontRow is also a faceplate for Apple’s movie trailer gallery which is pretty slick. The latest announcements from Apple are their associations with ABC and NBC - this is because FrontRow will now allow your Mac to become your next Tivo, but better (for them) because the networks are still getting paid for their content. Those more skilled with P2P and BitTorrent applications will discover an entire world of on-demand viewing options that they can store and access from their new FrontRow machine and enjoy at their will.

Still Needs Work!
Not surprising, FrontRow is still in its infancy. This is likely why they held it back from either being a free application or a part of iLife ‘05. In my mind the following advancements are critical:

1. Movie/DVD Library: Each time I put a DVD into my FrontRow enabled Mac it should create a log file of some sort and pull down cover art for me - very similar to the way iTunes does the Gracenote CDDB lookup. Eventually, what develops would be a visual index of my DVD collection that I could page through - not much different than their trailers interface. Even better would be the ability to click on an “i”, almost like their widgets, and get IMDB info on that disc, as well as a movie trailer - if available. This would make movie night a bit more fun!

2. Following the lead of the first item, there will hopefully be a FrontRow plug-in at some point that would allow users to connect a 400 Disc DVD changer (Sony has a variety of models available for ~ $300). Those of us with large/growing DVD libraries could daisy-chain up to nine of these bad boys together. Again, FrontRow would provide the interface, but the disc selected might actually delivery video and audio through other ports (DVI/HDMI ideally). Your Mac would just help you pick which disc you would be watching and keeping track of the library you own - making execptions for rentals.

3. High Definition: Two weeks back I came upon a HD/5.1 rip of a new popular Showtime series called Sleeper Cell. It was pretty clear that my 800Mhz machine was incapable of delivering HD video alone, let alone the surround soundtrack. Regardless, from Apple’s dedication to HD (from iMovie up to FCP) it should be serious about the consumer end and provide a means within FrontRow that would allow us to take their next generation Mini and use it as a real HD record/playback device. Our local PBS station here in Milwaukee finally stepped up to 5.1 so I look forward to watching Soundstage and Austin City Limits the way they were meant to be seen and heard. Ideally, my Mac will aid in that process.

-pjc

PS: Look for more posts this week on my new Jeep, my new Video iPod and our forth-coming Podcast!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 6:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.