Apple TV - Now What?

[thankins]

Well last night I was out and had a impulse to buy an apple TV. I got it home and have it all set up. Now I have a few questions.

1. Can it stream my Movies if iTunes is open on my iMac or just sync? I got it set to stream my iTunes which I always leave open.

2. I have about 8 GBs of avi/divx/xvid videos in my Movies folder. I have quicktime pro and opened one of them and saved as .mov last night, then imported into iTunes. Then after realizing it wouldn't play on my apple TV I right clicked and said "Convert to Apple TV" The process took ages - around 2 hours or so to do it all. Now I have the original movie and a new one in my lib. Is there a application that can do all this for me?

Would the new files be playable on my iphone as well?

3. Is HandBrake only for DVDs? or can I use it for files such as VOB etc as well?

Sorry for the questions - new to the whole Apple TV.


I appreciate any help

 

[alFR]

1. It can either stream or sync as long as iTunes is running on your iMac. Performance will depend on the network speed, of course.
2. Try Visualhub for the conversions.
2a. Depends on what you encode them as. Have a look at the different presets in VisualHub and you'll get an idea of what will work on what.
3. HandBrake will work with DVDs and DVD-like things (VOB files etc.). VisualHub is your best bet for converting anything other than that to Apple TV format.

 

[thankins]

1. It can either stream or sync as long as iTunes is running on your iMac. Performance will depend on the network speed, of course.
2. Try Visualhub for the conversions.
2a. Depends on what you encode them as. Have a look at the different presets in VisualHub and you'll get an idea of what will work on what.
3. HandBrake will work with DVDs and DVD-like things (VOB files etc.). VisualHub is your best bet for converting anything other than that to Apple TV format.

Thank you for your help.

Is there a guide or anything regarding VisualHub? As in getting the best quality out of my files but still maintaining a decent video size?

 

[FreeState]

1. Can it stream my Movies if iTunes is open on my iMac or just sync? I got it set to stream my iTunes which I always leave open.

I would recommend just syncing your photos - all the rest of your content in iTunes this way will automatically show up on the AppleTV without having to ever go to sources.

Would the new files be playable on my iphone as well?

Depends on how its been encoded - the iPhone does not support B Frames which are used in AppleTV. The best bet is to use HandBreaks setting for iPod Hi-rez and bump the Average Bitrate up to 2500 - then it will look fairly decent on both devices - I do this on music video's and just use the AppleTV preset on movies because dont usually watch them on my phone - if I want one for a trip etc I will encode it with the right click in iTunes (which is rarely).

 

[alFR]

Is there a guide or anything regarding VisualHub? As in getting the best quality out of my files but still maintaining a decent video size?

There's a lot of info on here in various posts: also there's a lot on the visualhub forums (linked to from the main visualhub site).