My interest of owning atv 2 has piequed recently after I found out that there is a way to stream directly to atv 2 from
the media source.
I owned a 32 lcd tv in my upstairs bedroom and currently have no connectivity to anything(no cable box, no pc hooked up to it).
The way I watch anything on it would be to connect macbook over VGA and use beta air video client(although it works extremely well) to stream
the media from my downstairs main pc(i5 win 7 work horse which is running air video server mostly consist of AVI and MKV files 720 and above format).
I have looked at 2 possibilties(xbmc and plex) and took a simple notes based on my findings.
-- xbmc --
-Although original, setup is more cumbersome.
-Uses hardware decoding(?) which means possibly more burden on atv 2 to decode avi and mkv files
This however means you can stream from NAS.(no running pc all time required).
-Review of playing HD contents are not at best(stuttering problem)
-- plex --
-Simple setup
-Requires PC and transcoding happens on pc(?, this I am not 100% sure as of yet) but since it requires running pc, I assume so(in my
case I do not mind and I rather have my pc do the heavy lifting.
-Review says HD contents play ok but whole OS is bit buggy(?)
-One major concern is that some people in review says that atv2 using plex OR xbmc should be connected by ethernet and not by wireless.
This is a major bummer and I hope someone w/ this particular experience can share the results.
Hooking up atv 2 by ethernet kinda defeats the purpose.
I have been independently testing plex client on ipad 2. Although menu auto populating movie info is rather impressive(also most likely preferable method of accessing media from tv), I say streaming is better on air video. Air video seems to utlize my computer hardware better. Movie starts faster and also stop and start is much quicker.
At this point however I am just more interested in testing out the plex client to make sure it can play majority of the files that I have.(it seems to be doing a great job).
What I eventually want to do is to install plex on atv 2(whenever I decide to buy it).
I wish someone reads my post and either add or correct me on the parts that I am wrong.
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Overall, Plex is fine for what you wanna do. I wouldn't recommend running over a wifi connection (too many bits flying around will saturate and bring your connection to its knees), but over a wired connection it's very smooth, even with 1080p mkvs. I have the occasional crash, but it's nothing write home about. The new version of PMS brought much better subtitle support. I would recommend plex, it's worth the trouble of jailbreaking.
Just curious, is this based on your personal experience(running plex over wifi vs ethernet)?
This concerns me since I refuse to run cable to my upstairs to atv 2. It really defeats the purpose of having atv 2. My 2009 mb plays 720 or 1080 fine using air video client(where transcode happens all on server). Why can't atv 2 do this(assuming plex transcode happens on server side as well)??
) via Plex on a 2009 Mini to ATV2. Worked perfectly fine. The menus are slightly finicky..I've had a decent number of crashes. But TBH the occasional 10-second reboot of the ATV2 is well worth the benefits. The ATV2 will automatically downconvert to 720p regardless of how high the source content is. That's an OS restriction.
TV- tired of waiting for 1080p support, etc. I don't own much- if any- iTunes purchased content, but I have done the work of using MetaX to tag everything (movie posters & descriptions, etc) I do have. 
