Front Row on Leopard – Like getting an AppleTV for Free

Like the rest of the people who will burn in hell we are tooling around with our new Leopard upgrades (don’t worry we’ve got an order in for a family pack – already paid for) finding some little interesting things here and there. One majorly cool thing we found is Front Row….in its new home in the /Applications folder like a real grown up app. It used to be hidden in the Library folder.

The best part of the new Front row is that you can browse your local network for media to play. That isn’t just your MP3 SMB fileserver, that is also your buddies computer that came over to hang out on your wireless. That also includes your pesky neighbor who is stealing your bandwidth to download torrents. Any shares on the network – are browsable.

Unfortunately, Front Row still doesn’t play .avi files (or at least our tricked out super compressed movies). I am sure there are some hacks on the way – or maybe we need to update our codecs? We’ll find out soon.

Also the new Front Row has a separate menu for podcasts, movies, tv and music. the settings page is very similar to AppleTV. Actually. This is AppleTV – in Leopard!