copying dvd collection and streaming to tv

[cs4160]

Hello,

In @6 weeks, when snow leopard comes out, i will be transitioning from the wintel platform to a quad core mac pro. One of the things i am wondering is what is considered the optimum set up for streaming video to my tv. I currently have the xbox 360 and a fairly modern quad core wintel desktop and as i said, i plan on getting the mac pro. I currently have about 400 DVD's that i would like to set up steaming to my tv. I aslo have dish network as my provider with their hd dvr and an external 750g drive plugged into it with about 130 hd movies taped via Dish.

Given my current and planed hw, what software would you recommend to burn the disks. And how should i set up the streaming? Throw it onto internal HDD's in my old wintel pc and stream via xbox? Use Apple TV although i hear it hasnt been updated in a while and after buying the mac pro not sure i will want to spend more money initially...And will the files I copy and store on my HDD be OS agnostic or will i run into a problem if i go from having them streamed via my pc to a mac based solution?

Sorry for the confusion, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[DeeGee48]

DVD Rip 'N' View

Well, Mac the Ripper will rip the ENTIRE DVD, menus and all, to your hard drive. Then you can view whatever you want off the hard disk, just as if you were viewing from the DVD. All you would have to do, really, is hook up your computer to your TV (HDMI recommended if it's an HDTV) and off you go!

Also, if you don't want to hook up your Mac or PC directly to the TV and have to run the whole thing everytime you want to watch a movie, both Western Digital and Seagate/Free Agent have 'home theatre' boxes into which you slide (or plug in) an external hard drive. Rip the DVD's to this drive, instead of the internal one, move it over to the box, and start the show. Between them, the hookups include HDMI, component, S-video, composite, etc (though each system has different outputs, so you'll have to choose which one works best for you). These are probably the easiest solutions to this problem at the moment (besides Apple TV), and they are not expensive.