media sharing and External Storage

1) 10.5.8
2) 10.6 http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1575
3) Yes
4) Just use 2 USB3 cases for the drives, that way you can fill them at a reasonable speed on a newer computer.
5) It will still suck.
Sell the AppleTV and get a Raspberry Pi, or 2, and let that one do all the stuff.

Old G4 mini's are suitable for 2 things: running light old PowerPC-only system 9 apps and as decoration. All modern PPC apps are better off with rosetta, either on a Snow Machine or inside a Snow virtualisation on a Mavericks one.

geoffpalmeruk said:

I had a raspberry pi and hated it i ran rasbmc i think it was and the lag was terrible, frequent lock ups, but thanks for the info on the other points. I've got my new desk made so will be installing everything tonight i'll let you know how much it sucks or not!

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Actually for streaming video, USB 2.0 is plenty as long as you aren't hammering them with tons of video streams at once. Blu-ray 1X reader reads at 4.5 MB/s. USB 2.0 is capable of about 32MB/s which means you should be able to transfer (theoretically) up to 7 Blu-Ray streams at once.

I should also point out that I have no idea how well iTunes will run on a an old G4 Mac Mini nor do I know how "good" the USB ports are on those old Mini's so it is very possible that the system could bottleneck due to the CPU and/or the I/O system.

It should play video just fine as long as it's one at a time...and who on Earth watches more than one thing at once, let alone on the same device?! The negative hint of this response is aimed at the first person to reply to you OP and not you

geoffpalmeruk said:

Now i just need to work out how to install osx 10.5 onto it!
i have the disc but it's DL and DL isn't supported by my mini. I also can't boot from USB

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Why can't you boot from USB?

My suggestion would be to copy the files over to an external USB drive using a PC which supports dual layer and then copying them from the drive to the Mac. You may need to do further steps to use the files straight off the Mac's hard drive once they're on there but usually it involves just opening the contents of the main file.

geoffpalmeruk said:

I had a raspberry pi and hated it i ran rasbmc i think it was and the lag was terrible, frequent lock ups, but thanks for the info on the other points.

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When did you try it. The software has come a long way lately. They finally manage to unleash the HD decoding power of the GPU. You can also overclock it to 1Ghz.