Naquada

It’s been a busy week, the brand new 24 inch iMac 2.8ghz I ordered last week actually arrived a few days early, it should have been here next wednesday, but a large brown box was waiting for me yesterday at home. I’d also got hold of a copy of Leopard through Apples up-todate program, and I was quite surprised to find that they had dropped a CPU drop-in upgrade into the iMac box, which it turns out is a full DVD that is bootable, as opposed to the upgrade only DVD you get through apple up-todate.

I’d already upgraded the G5 powerpc mac, doing an in place upgrade as opposed to a fresh install, as well as doing the same for the Mini Mac, and Macbook, but I decided to do a fresh wipe and install on the new iMac after having upgraded the new iMac with the DVD initially. The speed difference seems to be huge, and I’m not sure why, but the increase in speed between an upgraded system on the iMac and a fresh install was very much noticeable.

Although I’m now 100% intel on all macs, I was very pleased to notice that the Front Row application, for running music, DVD’s, photos and movies is now available to all macs, Intel, PPC, with or without an apple remote. The applications grown up and got itself its own little .app and icon. Apple have also decided to lift out the AppleTV backrow application and make that the standard for all systems.

Backrow or FrontRow depending on how you want to look at it is a major change to the old Front Row version 1.x, firstly it’s completely independent of iTunes and iPhoto, there are good and bad points of this. Firstly Front Row can do more, and doesn’t need iTunes or iPhoto running. Unfortunately because of it’s independence from those applications, it means that if you’re playing music in iTunes and enter Front Row, the music stops, and visa versa. However there are major plus points on some of the functionality gained from AppleTV, namely in the ability to handle VIDEO_TS folders directly. On a DVD disc, DVD movie files are stored in the VIDEO_TS folder (which if your interested stands for Video title Set). There is also an AUDIO_TS folder, this is where DVD-Audio would be stored, but usually the folder is empty. If you want to pull your DVD off onto your mac you can normally use applications like Mac The Ripper to extract a VIDEO_TS folder of your required content (full DVD or just selected features) or just copy the entire DVD onto the mac.

I keep a number of DVD’s on my main mac using this method, and play them from the DVD player in OSX, I’d tried a number of options for being able to browse and play these from downstairs on the mini mac, and having a nice interface on the main mac for playing them. None of these really seemed to work successfully. However, on the new Front Row the movies menu allows access to a further submenu of Movies Folder, this looks at your movies folder on the source mac, any folders containing VIDEO_TS folders show up as DVD’s on which selecting them throws up the DVD menu and allows playing of the DVD as if it was inserted into the DVD drive of the machine.

If like me you don’t want to keep all your DVD’s in your movies folder you can place and alias in there to point to where your DVD’s are held. Mine contains an alias link off to my terabyte external USB drive. I thought about posting a tutorial on this, but it’s pretty straight forward, although it’s not mentioned in the Apple documentation as far as I can see about Front Rows ability to play VIDEO_TS folders directly.

Down sides with Leopard seems to be the large number of applications that seem not to behave that well with the new OS. So far a number of application I work with daily have caused issues. Adobe Photoshop CSx seems to have issues, I’ve never seen the point in giving adobe lots of money for upgrades, so I’ve been sat on Photoshop CS for a number of years, but Adobes statement on supported application under Leopard lists CS, CS2 and CS3 as being incompatible, with CS3 being your best bet. I did manage to get Photoshop CS working by installing a trial, and then removing it. I’m guessing it laid down some files over CS that got it working reasonably well.

Roxio’s titanium toast 7 was next to fail, although it started up, it refused to burn DVD’s, again the solution was fiddle a bit and downgrade from version 7.12 to 7.0.1, which allowed burning to work again. Twittr 2.25 also seems a bit unstable, with it refusing to quit on system shutdown, and crashing on OSX startup (although a relaunch of twittr works fine). My Wacom tablet needed a upgrade of the driver to a specific 10.4+ version and a few other applications just needed a refresh.

To be honest most of the work of moving to the new iMac was taken care of by the migration assistant (which for people who want to wipe and reinstall leopard works with a time machine backup) connecting the two machine via firewire and running the migration assistant successfully moved over 64gig of applications and user information straight over to the new iMac, in less than 2 hours the whole machine was re-setup just like the old machine, but with better hardware..

I’ll definitely be posting separately about the new iMac, but I have to admit I did do the standard unboxing photo’s last night

Technorati Tags: front row, iMac, leopard, mac, migration assistant, video_ts

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Geeking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.