I haven't noticed any talk about this here, but front end fans might want to check XHub here: http://www.snarb.tk/

XHub is a pretty nice application. Version 1.3 is the very responsive. It supports cover art for movies and has a nice interface for ElGato's EyeTV. The biggest issue for me, which is true of most of the front ends, is the lack of support for AC3 pass-through. Most of the files that i look at are .avi or .mkv with AC3 audio. VLC plays these back very nicely and I get AC3 pass-through via the optical output on my G5. Unfortunately, most of the front ends use Quicktime or some derivative which will only down-mix the AC3 audio to a stereo pair. XHub uses Mplayer, which is suppose to support AC3 pass-through but I have never been able to get it to work.

XHub is a pretty nice application. Version 1.3 is the very responsive. It supports cover art for movies and has a nice interface for ElGato's EyeTV. The biggest issue for me, which is true of most of the front ends, is the lack of support for AC3 pass-through. Most of the files that i look at are .avi or .mkv with AC3 audio. VLC plays these back very nicely and I get AC3 pass-through via the optical output on my G5. Unfortunately, most of the front ends use Quicktime or some derivative which will only down-mix the AC3 audio to a stereo pair. XHub uses Mplayer, which is suppose to support AC3 pass-through but I have never been able to get it to work.

Mplayer is really the wrong way to go on the Mac and I'm surprised that so many projects have adopted it (MediaCentral, and apparently XHub). The visual quality is very sub par and it lacks features that are found in VLC. Since VLC is also open source, I don't know why it has not been selected as the back end for Mac media centers. Maybe it's not documented as well, or maybe it simply hasn't been broken up into usable libraries for the Mac.

It's really quite astonishing how little information there is on the snarb.tk website. Maybe the software is good, but the site shure turns me off in a hurry.

Not very useful so far. Hangs up for me when going after networked files and/or VIDEO_TS directories.

Hmmm.. not too much info on the site... anyone care put up screenshots? :)

You can download the XHub and try it for free. I will try to post some screen shots tonight. As I mentioned in a previous post the app works. It seems responsive. I have around 500 movies spread across 3-drives. It does support cover art for movies. It does music, radio, EyeTV, photos, etc... I'm not saying it perfect, but compared to the alternatives, it does a good job. (I have always said the state of front ends for MAC is pretty dismal).The biggest issue and the main reason that I don't use it, is that is it based on mplayer. I can't get mplayer to work ac3 pass-though and I also get artifacts in the video that I don't see with vlc.