Replacing htpc with ATV

I'm waiting for the day the ATV allows this. For the time being, media can only be streamed from a computer or idevice.

Bozley0621 said:

I'm waiting for the day the ATV allows this. For the time being, media can only be streamed from a computer or idevice.

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To expand on this: the ATV needs to see an itunes account/location, whether its on the cloud or itunes on another computer in order to stream. you cant just pull files. That is unless you jailbreak it. Also, coming from windows 7 are all your video files in apple friendly formats?

your best bet with your current hardware is to leave the imac always on. Turn on homesharing and hook up the external drive. Import all your movies music and tv shows into itunes, then homeshare to all of your "i" devices. Both wired and wireless, you should have no issues unless you have some seriously large blu ray rips.

If the PC won't be used much, install iTunes and another hard drive to make it your streaming machine. Doesn't need to be that powerful to stream your content to the ATV.

sergiobaschi said:

If I connect the external disk to the AE, can't I import movies to the iMac's iTunes that way?

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I have a setup like this. I point all my iTunes apps on any desktop/laptop to the AE base station's network disk, which has one iTunes folder on it. You must enable Home Sharing in iTunes on whichever computer's iTunes application will use it. AppleTV cannot talk directly to that iTunes folder.

Then you can access the computer's library through the Computers menu on AppleTV.

For many movies purchased through iTunes, you can stream directly to AppleTV from the cloud, without first downloading them to your Mac. But if you've acquired these movies outside of iTunes, you'll have to stream them in the fashion above.

I generally don't encounter any problems with internal streaming, particularly over a dual-channel 802.11n wifi network (which has WAY more overhead than your broadband connection). Where I occasionally run into problems is streaming 1080p from the cloud which can hiccup even on a 30Mbps connection depending on what kind of load Apple is experiencing on their end... but it doesn't happen often.