So few people used Front Row that Apple removed it from Lion. That left three contenders for Mac media center software:

  • XBMC: The grandfather of this type of software.
  • Boxee: Good stuff, which led the company formed around the software to expand beyond software to hardware with the Boxee Box.
  • Plex: The slickest of the three alternatives, but I found it to be buggy every time I tried to use it.

The most popular was Boxee, but the company made an announcement today. From TUAW:

The company is releasing version 1.5 of its desktop app for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu this week, featuring many of the improvements that will be appearing in the Boxee Box firmware early next year, but there’s a caveat. This will be the final release of Boxee’s desktop build; future development efforts will be focused on the Boxee Box hardware and on tablets like the iPad. The 1.5 version will be available for download on Boxee’s site through the end of January 2012, which gives the Boxee team a bit of time to take down the “roll your own” section on the Boxee site.

At home I have my Mac mini hooked up to my 46-inch TV. That mini is the heart & soul of my home media consumption (with my iPad in second place, and almost entirely for music when I’m cooking or showering or sometimes reading). I’ve tried using all the various media center software packages on my mini—some of them for months at a time—but none of them lasted very long.

The reason? They were more trouble then they were worth. Indexing my media files often took forever, & wasn’t consistent. Navigating through my media files was too cumbersome. The extras that were available—things like Pandora, Hulu, and Netflix—I either didn’t use or found it easier to use via a web browser.

And that brings me to the real reason I quit using media center software: I didn’t need them. With screen sharing (or Apple Remote Desktop, which is what I actually use), I can connect directly to the mini & do what I need to do. If I want to listen to music, I use iTunes; if I want to watch a movie, I use QuickTime (the fact that I carefully organize my movies makes finding the one I want to watch easy, but if necessary I can use Spotlight); if I want to listen to Pandora or watch Hulu or some other web-based service, I use Safari. I don’t need media center software to do any of that. Boxee leaving the Mac isn’t relevant when it’s simply not necessary.