[geeks] ~RE: Mac World announcements...

[Anthony Ortenzi]

Dan Sikorski said:
> Well, I believe that i can use itunes to do what i want and then use
> front row to get the same playback interface as the apple tv, and run
> that on a mac mini and get just what i want, only at three times the
> price of the apple tv.  Thing is, the mini would have additional
> capabilities that the apple tv doesn't have, so i guess it's worth it.

I actually bought a Mac Mini and an AppleTV at just about the same time to
use in conjunction with one another.  I bought maybe 3 weeks after the
introduction of the AppleTV, so I have the 40GB model.  I planned to use it
as a media library similar to how one might use a DVD jukebox.  I'm not an
audio- or videophile, so non-glaring quality issues are mostly a don't-care.

Of course, in order to have a large video library on a 40GB hard drive is...
hard.

Without any "hacking", there was no way to expand the capacity of the
library outside of streaming it from an iTunes library.

That's where the Mini comes in.  It runs iTunes 24/7 to supply access to the
library, which exists on a 1TB USB2 drive hanging off the Mini.

I ripped all my DVDs to ISOs and used VisualHub[0] to transcode the ISOs and
add to iTunes.  VisualHub also takes on AVIs with Xvid or DivX encoding no
problem.  Also nifty -- Xgrid support[1].

The setup works OK.  I'd prefer to hang the USB drive off the AppleTV for a
few reasons, including more responsive fast-forward and rewind (it's slow
when streaming the video) and freeing up the Mini from the iTunes sharing
duties.  If Handbrake weren't so kludgy in comparison, maybe I'd move the
transcoding duties over to my Windows box. I haven't seen anything quite as
polished as VH on the Windows side, though, and I won't spend hours looking
when I've got something that works nicely for me.

Youtube, Flickr, and .Mac support -- I could see why someone *might* care,
but who the F wants to do anything that includes typing by selecting letters
one at a time with such a simplified remote?  It's painful.

-Anthony

[0] http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/ - Worth the $23.32 for
simplicity.  Only formats I can't convert from that I've wanted to are .mkv
and .rmvb

[1] Got me to thinking that if I were going to do any crazy amounts of
transcoding, it might be worth it to get an octocore Dell SC1430 when Dell's
got some kind of special going on and get OSx86 going on it to get up to 8
encodes going at a time.  The jobs are dispatched on a file-by-file basis,
not parallelizing the transcoding of an individual file, so this is only
suitable for overall throughput, not "latency" of getting things transcoded
quickly.