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Deciding on what to do to bride my Media to my TV. Apple TV? Mac Mini?

waywardsage

waywardsage

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 22, 2006
282
0
CA
A friend of mine is a Windows fan and is going to be building a crazy Home Theatre PC and has been trying to influence me to get into it as well. Problem is, I'm an all Mac person. All my pics are being organized in iPhoto, Music in iTunes and all my video's are spread across a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini.

So i'm trying to find the best purchase to begin creating a good Home Theatre PC setup where i can play all my video files, and web video on my HDTV.

I have a lot of different formatted video's ranging from Xvid, Divix, AVI, WMV, and apple DRM'ed video's from iTunes.

Is there any decent way to make this happen? Is an Apple TV a good option for me? A mac mini?

I was also debating about getting a Drobo FS and starting with two 2TB hard drives and centralizing my data on them and sharing them over my wired/wireless network. Does the Apple TV play nice with this?

Any help would be great.
 
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steve1138

macrumors newbie
Jun 23, 2010
6
0
i had an apple tv and it was very nice. Eventually I got frustrated with it limited functionality, so I sold it online and used that money towards a refurb mac mini. I like the mac mini so so so much better using the wireless keyboard and the magic trackpad, BUT other people in my house aren't that familiar with a mac so they have a hard time using it and they prefer the apple tv for how simple it was. you can get some media center program like Plex to use on the mac mini, which is the closest thing to the apple tv interface you can get on a mac. hope this helps!
 
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Bna0atb

macrumors newbie
Jun 13, 2010
1
0
Mac mini vs apple tv

I agree on the Mac mini but I'm interested in the potential of the apple tv and the dumped of the next version possibly running ios 4. If it runs ios 4 I want it. If not the Mac mini with a media center software is the way I'm going to go. Does apple have a media center software that works slick?
 
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poloponies

Suspended
May 3, 2010
2,661
1,366
I'm a longtime Apple TV user and to be honest it frustrates the heck out of me but overall I'm satisfied. I have all my media on a Drobo connected to a 2-year-old iMac in our family room and I stream everything to the ATV. I'm anxious for a hardware update because I have to reboot way too frequently.
 
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