need help to understand apple tv

Understanding Apple TV

No you do not need to keep your mac on if you "store" the content on the drive.
You can use a network HDD to store movies but then you have to "stream" content.
Best way to get DVDs to your hard drive would be to rip and encode for ATV via handbreak. Do a search of these forums about handbreak.

Think of the Apple TV like it was a big iPod - one that is connected to your TV. In general, you sync content through iTunes to the AppleTV (just like an iPod).

Once it is there, you use the remote to select and play the content on your TV. As long as you aren't streaming from your computer, your computer isn't involved in the playback process at all.

You can't use external storage on your AppleTV without a hack.

Like Jessica said, you can use Handbreak to rip your DVDs to your Mac, and then sync them to your Apple TV. Handbreak has special settings for ripping DVD's for AppleTV playback.

If you have more DVD's than will fit on your AppleTV hard drive, you may want to consider streaming content from your computer to your Apple TV. This would allow you to keep your DVD's on your Mac (or on an external drive connected to your Mac), and use your Mac to stream the data to the Apple TV. This would require your Mac to be up and running while you watched movies.

I don't stream movies like this though, so I can't help you much more with that part of the process...

The biggest issue with streaming movies into the TV is that they must be streamed from a computer running itunes. The TV cannot stream movies from an Itunes Server, only from the computer to which you sync your apple TV from. If you want to be able to stream movies from a NAS (network hard drive), you need to get something like a Popcorn hour.

What I do, is that I store kids movies locally, and whenever I want to watch stuff that is not appropriate for my kids, I turn on my Mac with the rest of the movies and they show up in my Movies List.

Hongkongphooey7 said:

Thanks guys for all your input, i'm convinced now time to spend some cash down the local apple shop.

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It's handbrake, not handbreak.

Tilpots said:

It's handbrake, not handbreak.

Click to expand...

Oops - good catch...

richardhunt said:

The biggest issue with streaming movies into the TV is that they must be streamed from a computer running itunes. The TV cannot stream movies from an Itunes Server, only from the computer to which you sync your apple TV from. If you want to be able to stream movies from a NAS (network hard drive), you need to get something like a Popcorn hour.

What I do, is that I store kids movies locally, and whenever I want to watch stuff that is not appropriate for my kids, I turn on my Mac with the rest of the movies and they show up in my Movies List.

Click to expand...

This seems like a good suggestion. Keep the movies that are frequently needed (or likely to be needed by younger family members) on the Apple TV, and keep the rest on your Mac.

Then they can play from the AppleTV directly, and you can watch others later, when your computer is turned on...