XHub Media Center is one of the most popular alternatives to Apple’s Front Row software. Developed exclusively for Mac OS X Tiger and later, XHub Media Center is fast, feature-rich and highly customizable, yet amazingly easy to use. Just connect your Mac to your living room TV and enjoy all of your digital media on the big screen from the comfort of your sofa. In addition to the essential music, movies, and photos modules, XHub Media Center offers internet radio, web browsing, and EyeTV integration.
XHub Media Center has an appealing interface and is fully themeable, with a wide range of skins and sound sets to choose from. You can even design your own theme for a truly personalized media center experience!
With built-in support for Salling Clicker, an award-winning software that allows you to use a Bluetooth/WiFi-enabled cell phone or PDA as a high-end remote control, XHub Media Center has the most sophisticated control options available on any system.
XHub also supports remotes from Apple, ATI, Keyspan and many other manufacturers.
• MUSIC
With XHub Media Center, it’s easy to access your entire iTunes music library. You can play individual songs, entire albums or playlists, use Cover Flow, play songs by genre or composer, and watch captivating visualizations that change with the rhythm of your music.
With XHub, fetching missing album artwork from the Internet is easy as pie. Just press the button. You can easily set the rating of a song, toggle a playlist’s shuffle and repeat mode, skip to an upcoming song or even wipe it from the playlist.
XHub reads data from your music library much faster than other media center applications. It will gather up all of your artists, albums, songs, genres or composers in just a blink.
• DVD
Enjoy watching your favorite DVDs with XHub Media Center. XHub will automatically keep track of where you last left off.
• PHOTOS
With XHub Media Center, you can display slide shows of your digital pictures anytime, while listening to your favorite tune. Choose from a wide range of photo effects and slideshow transition styles.
• VIDEOS
Enjoy digital videos with XHub Media Center. You can easily find and watch home movies, theatrical trailers, video podcasts and locally stored DVDs, as well as music videos and TV shows downloaded from the iTunes music store.
• NEWS
With XHub Media Center, you can browse and read internet news feeds and surf the web from your living room couch.
• RADIO
Enjoy listening to internet radio with XHub Media Center. You can download and play podcasts and tune in to thousands of free online radio stations from DJs and broadcasters around the world.
• TV
Enjoy digital TV broadcasts and recordings with XHub Media Center and EyeTV by Elgato Systems. XHub is the only Mac media center with integrated EyeTV.
• VIRTUAL KEYBOARD
With XHub, browsing menus is quick and easy. Simply type a few letters on the virtual (or physical) keyboard to jump right to the menu item of your choice. No need to scroll through thousands of artists to find that ZZ Top evergreen!
You can also scroll through menus quickly with the left/right button on your remote, skipping ten items per click.
• THEMEABLE
XHub has more than twenty subtly animated interfaces – varying from the slick and elegant to the curious and colorful – that you can change to as often as you like, with ease. You can even design your own skins! Pick your favorite color, font and background image, movie, slideshow or even Quartz composition.
You can also choose from a variety of sound effects.
• SPECIAL ACTIONS
By giving the Menu button on your remote a long press, you can trigger different actions depending on what you are currently doing. Set the rating of a song, fetch missing album artwork from the Internet, open the Go To Time menu or start a TV recording. Best of all – YOU decide what action to trigger.
• SPEECH ASSISTANCE
XHub has optional speech assistance. When enabled, browse menu items are read out loud, by Victoria, Fred, Junior or whatever voice you prefer. You can turn on speech assistance, leave the living room and change music playlist while making a sandwich in the kitchen.
• CELL PHONE REMOTE CONTROL
XHub can be controlled with your Bluetooth-equipped cell phone or PDA. If you use the plug-in remote for Salling Clicker, you don’t even need to stay in sight of your TV to control XHub – the browse menus appear right on your phone’s display! The numerical keypad even serves as a multi-tap input device, for quick searching.
XHub ships with plug-ins for Salling Clicker and Romeo, and pre-configured HID files for more than 20 cell phones from Sony Ericsson.
• MOVIE POSTERS
Drop your movie posters in the designated folder and XHub will display them when browsing movies. You can also add folder posters to be displayed for all the files in a folder, for example the episodes of a TV series.
• FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE
Don’t have EyeTV? Don’t care for album artwork? Want to prevent system sleep or not? Prefer green to blue? It’s up to you. XHub is fully customizable.