Need advice for home theatre/accessories

[stuckinORD]

I know it said to be specific but I'm not sure what I actually want.

Here's what I have:

24" iMac 640 GB HD w/4GB of ram

16 GB 1st Gen iTouch

PS3

xbox 360

40" Samsung LCD w/120hz processor


Not really a dilemma, but I feel I could be doing more. I'm doing anythin interesting and when I read most of these posts here I'm a little lose.

What would an Apple TV do for me? Or mac mini for a DVR?

I already use Handbrake to rip some of my DVDs for my iTouch and that's it. Could I be streaming stuff to my TV, PS3, ect?

I'm trying to be specific as possible, but I'm just a little lost. Also, does anyone here rip their DVDs more than once, ie one for the iTouch and the other for Apple TV? I've been ripping them with different specs and can notice no difference on the iPod, but when 'full screen' is selected on my 24", I can definitely notice the lower quality of the standard iPhone/itouch presets.

Thanks

 

[notsofatjames]

I personally upgraded my PS3s harddrive to 500Gb (cost about £85 and 10 minutes of my life). Now I rip all my DVDs, but don't re-encode them. The filesize is quite big (anywhere between 4-8GB depending on the DVD), but there is no loss of quality. Those get transferred directly to my PS3, then deleted off my laptop to save room. You can carry on keeping your iTouch copies seperate too.
Equally instead of buying the PS3 HDD, you can store them on your computer and stream them to your PS3, (or xBox as far as I'm aware) and achieve the same effect. To rip them I use two programs called FairMount and DVD2oneX.

An Apple TV would be a quick one-shot solution that would let you access anything you can get into iTunes on your TV. There are loads of threads here about how to rip your DVDs into iTunes, and of course you can always download from the iTunes store. It also makes it easier to get your music out of your TV or if you have a nice surround system out of that.

Im yet to see a mac mini provide an elegant DVR solution, but someone can prove me wrong please. If you want a DVR your options are really just to buy a DVR, or to buy PlayTV for your PS3, and that can record (paired with a large HDD, plenty of storage). Im not sure on the pros and cons of each though as I don't own either.

You just need to ask yourself, what do you actually want to achieve, then work out how to achieve it. For me I wanted to play my DVD collection without having to get up and put a disk in, and without having to have a computer running all the time so I could stream it. And I wanted to do it at a minimal cost after spending lots of money on TV and Speakers etc.