Apple TV - Home Share or Plex?

Is the entire media library encoded using mp4. If not, you need to convert them into mp4 to be able to use with iTunes. I am not sure why you want to use iTunes for media sharing rather than Plex as Plex offers more capabilities than iTunes. Have you looked into PlexConnect, which allows using AppleTV with Plex.

Daniel97 said:

Also if I copy all my movies to iTunes does it just copy a mirror rather than the entire file? I have 2TB of videos, I don't particularly want 4!

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In iTunes go into the preferences, then advanced. In there it will say "copy files to iTunes media folder" or something like that. If it is unticked then it will only insert a link into iTunes so it will read the file from whereever you have it stored.
If the box is ticked it will copy the file to the iTunes media folder (location is shown on the same advanced preferences page) so you will end up having double.

Daniel97 said:

Maybe ill have to research Plex Connect .. it looks a bit complicated

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It is not complicated etal. Yes, initially the number of steps that you need to perform may look a little daunting, but it should not take more than 15 minutes. Once you install it on your mac mini plex server, you can connect as many apple tvs as you want. There are few guides available on the PlexConnect forum of the plex site (https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/forum/136-appletv-plexconnect/). Some forum users created little helper tools called Plexify and OpenPlex to reduce the complexity involved in installing PlexConnect.

If you have iPhone and aTV, then you can also use Air Video Server HD which will do on-the-fly transcoding so you don't need to convert your media to iTune/aTV-compatible format).

It does not have as many features as Plex, but it does support "native" Airplay (Plex only does Airplay mirroring).

Plex and AirPlay and Stuff

The Plex application on iOS definitely supports AirPlay as does any late model Mac so playing Plex to your AppleTV is a piece of cake.

Overall Plex hands down is the way to go. Its media manager rules and getting started with it is easy. The annual price for Plex connect is well worth the entrance fee giving you the capability to download movies to your devices and the iOS client app can even acts as its own mini media server with which other clients can connect. You can even tell the Plex Server to start streaming to any iOS client. In addition if you have friends with Plex you can view their libraries and gain access to more content.

In parallel the Plex app is available for most major TV set brands in case you don't have an AppleTV. They are releasing for xBox 360 soon and the xBox One client is already out. This is one company worth supporting.

Apple TV - Home Share or Plex?

I have a plex acct that I let all my friends use. I use Apple TV and only torrent mp4's from http://kickass.to I have a 1tb hard drive and a ton of movies that are mp4 that's what's great about that format. You get lossless quality in a smaller file. My setup is an Apple TV and my windows PC running itunes so I can stream from it.

I also torrent on my iPhone 5 and have a VLC player for playing .avi & xvid etc...

One thing I recently learned is since I'm jailbroken I can transfer .mp4 videos into my photo library and use airplay to stream them to my Apple TV 3 while still being able to use my iPhone to browse the internet or use apps.

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Here is a video I watched earlier describing in detail how to set up a media server on your windows PC and streaming it to an appletv3

http://youtu.be/FrXx0mrTNRk