Front Row is the application that makes the Mac mini a great media machine, however it's not all sweetness and light.

Front Row is basically a fancy front end to iTunes and QuickTime Player so it lists everything in your iTunes library (music, TV shows, podcasts etc) and anything under certain default folders (such as the Movies folder). You can also stream movie trailers online which is a nice feature. Apple recently announced movie rentals will be available using the Apple TV unfortunately this won't be available to other Front Row users as only the Apple TV supports the HDCP copy protection standard on it's HDMI port.

To be honest I've found Front Row to be less useful than I anticipated. I find playing music more convenient using iTunes - Front Row doesn't handle Artist/Album sorting very well when you have multiple artists on a single album. I've also had a few problems playing video but that's mainly due to them being in formats that aren't natively supported by QuickTime and so using third-party codecs, in those cases you are probably better off opening them in some other media player.

If you organise everything in iTunes and only use well supported video formats then it is actually a very good front end. I find it especially useful for flicking through and playing video podcasts downloaded through iTunes - the convenience of using the remote from the sofa can't be beat.

More about these issues later.