Yup I took the plunge. As the last piece of the puzzle and finally thinking I have a chance to convert all my movies to hard drives (got 1.5TB worth of firewire 8 goodness). What I needed was a converter that would rip all formats into Quicktime. After much search I fell over a program called SQUARED 5. holy mother of hesus is this program sweet. lets you rip Video TS files into .MOV with out losing quality, the coolest part is that you can do batch conversions (set it and forget it) AND AND AAAAANNNNDDDDD wait for it....IT IS FREE !!!!.

My Apple TV is going to be here tomorrow!. here is m setup:

24 inch IMAC (2GB ram)
2 External storage HDD (1TB and 1 500GB)
Airport Extreme wireless router (wireless N baby)
42 inch Sony LCD
6.1 Bose surround with 12 inch woofer
Airport Itunes express (serves 8 speakers in our down stairs open concept)
800 DVD Movies (have ripped 135 so far)

APPLE...you complete me

*insert jealous post here*

CNET\'s Review (7.7/10 - Very Good)

Conclusion

The easy setup, iTunes compatibility, and iPod-like interface and design is probably more than enough to make the Apple TV a slam dunk for consumers who are already faithful devotees of all things Mac and iPod. And there's no denying that its design and video streaming performance bests similar network media products we've seen to date. But the product's iTunes-only compatibility means that you're locked into Apple's online offerings, which--for now, anyway--don't look so good on exactly the sort of big-screen HDTVs with which the Apple TV is designed to be paired. If and when Apple improves the quality of its store's offerings--or includes a better option for reading or converting existing video files--the Apple TV would be a much easier recommendation. Until then, it's best suited for iTunes addicts only.

And it's been hacked already... Linky

Day 4.....still in love

I have now backed up about 60 movies using Handbrake for MAC and I have to say it just works.

I figured out how to apply DVD art to the movie along with the description that shows up in the Apple TV menu and it looks awesome.

So far I have not been using the Sync function but have streamed from Apple Airport extreme to the Apple tv over a distance of about 40 feet, with not one single lag.

Just a quick edit mentioning the specs of my movies after they are ripped, the quality is near if not better than DVD:

Average size : 1.0-1.4GIG
Ratio: 720x480
Sound 5.1 192kbs

Average rip time is about an hour.

With the Hacks becoming available for Apple TV it makes even more sense to ditch the endless stacks of DVD's and get a true movie on demand system.

Nice that you love the thing, but there's no way in hell - Just not possible that the quality is "Better" from a ripped copy of an original. I think your eyes / ears must be playing up dude!

I'm actually interested in one of these things now the DivX hack is out there. Be nice to see the refurb ones in the Apple Store for $250 soon.

A guy at work into this stuff who Mods 360's and just about every other game console ever says I should get an original Xbox and he'll mod it to play anything, about the only thing you can't play with those is HD content: http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/03/26/why-a-100-xbox-can-be-better-than-apple-tv

We did a Test Saturday Night, I have a 42 inch Sony rear LCD, there is no way you can tell the difference....

I have an X360 collecting dust you can have cheap

He was referring to this line. Same quality is believable, but better quality than original content, is neigh impossible.

Indeed - I was just fuckin with ya. Glad you like it. And with regards to the Xbox - I have a 360, MS have that thing locked down to tight. Although I do have the Firmware mod to play backup copies of my original games With the original Xbox however you can hack the hell out of it and combined with a bigger HD it makes a wonderful Media player.

42" TV is that perfect transitional size. Stuff isn't enlarged to big as to make anything look to bad. I have a 42" Sony Wega myself and play DivX though my DVD player - which look near DVD quality. Anything bigger tho - Like the 110" Projector setup I have planned and you will really see the degradation.

Take the plunge, trust me you will not regret it

What is the benefit of getting an Apple TV setup if I already have my PC hooked up directly to my TV?

Steve Jobs will rain coolness upon you!

Wait, that's not rain!

Hand (not rain) Jobs?

I guess you can already run the Apple TV OS on a Mac Mini with an External HD and then actually get the OSX usage out of it.

Waiting for them to hack the USB drive so one can plug a External HD into it.....looks like it is now a hackers toy, more exposure for Apple

I've been using a HTPC running MCE for about a year and the Apple TV seems very limiting in comparison. With my PC I've dumped my VCR, DVD player and CD changer from my stereo rack. I'm currently re-ripping my CD's losslessly and then they get boxed. I've ripped 600 CD's since Friday with this before using it as a DVD library. I just need to get started on ripping my laserdiscs before putting them on e-bay.

Nice setup. I have a total of 34654 tunes ripped from full CD's so I would need a few of these. I am currently ripping my 800 some DVD's to 1.5TB of firewire External hard drives. Itunes IMHO does the trick

I used to do the htpc thing alot - mainly freevo and mythtv, but both were fairly chunky as for everyday use. Once I got my xbox modded properly, I never looked back. It just works, and does everything very well. I got it pulling off of a raid5 server with about 2.5TB of space (and about 60% full, lol) and it's easily upgradable to lots more in the future. I got it hooked up over optical audio and component video going to a 65" HD rear projection bigscreen.

The xbox does indeed play pretty much anything. And technically, it will play HD movies, it'll just be choppy as hell. I had such high hopes for the 360, but they do indeed have it locked down solid.

The only drawback I've seen for my xbox is that I have to get up off my lazy ass and turn the thing on.

I feel like such a loser spending 30 seconds opening the DVD case and putting the disk in my player.

So what do you guys do when that drive you ripped everything to fails? Start over?

Replace/repair the failed drive and restore from the backups.

With the music, I have a copy of my library at a remote location that I periodically sync against. This is by far the largest area I have to worry about backing up. Other stuff like photos and financial records I have on multiple machines/disks in my house and some of it backed up to CD/DVD's. I haven't had multiple failures at once that ever lost anything.

I run MCE2005 with a 350GB raid setup for just TV gathering. I have that box tied into my home LAN and it pulls videos and pics from my wife's workstation and music from mine. All three workstations are in a raid mirrored setup for redundancy purposes. From our living room, you can do anything you want from the MCE2005 remote. We do have a wireless mouse/keyboard for whenever I need to do something at the OS level etc. If we REALLY like a dvd, we'll either rip if via DVDshrink etc to the hard drive, but for the most part we just rent from Netflix and leave it at that.

In my case, running raid5 allows for one drive failure and still all data is intact. Using software raid, I've been able to restore a good bit of data from a 2 drive failure before, but it's not worth the time or effort or the choppy results unless it's critical data. Next drive expansion I put together may have hot spares to sustain multiple drive failures (non-simultaneous of course) but so far the drives I'm running have been reliable enough to not bother.

Otherwise I have secondary and tertiary online remote backups and a good bit of data (the more important 50% or so) sitting around in disk format.

How are you going to do this? I've got a nice collection of Laserdiscs, and this might be a good reason to by an Apple TV (I know that not what your using), but since I currently don't have anything like this setup, with all the other Mac equipment and iTunes videos, and songs it's probably the best way to go now. I can rip the DVD's I got, but hadn't thought about doing the laserdisc's but I don't have a LD player that has a firewire or usb port on it to do the ripping that way. Do you have something other than connecting the video out on the LD and connecting it to the video in on the PC (mac)?

I'm not sure you understand the device I linked to. It's not a stereo component changer, but a PC peripheral. I load up 200 discs, let it identify the disks against an online database and then launch the batch rip. The next day, reload and repeat. I'm ripping in a day what was previously taking me weeks. Yesterday a friend dropped off his CD collection and I have another in line that wants to do his, so I may get closer to your 35000 tracks.

Good luck with the DVD rips, I have ripped a few DVD's to watch on my laptop on plane rides where I would rather have a 2nd battery instead of my DVD drive. On a computer screen they are fine, but I can tell at a glance they are rips on my 56" HDTV and wouldn't want that for my primary viewing experience. The only videos I have on a hard drive are things I get off bittorrent, mostly foreign broadcast TV series.

This changer is convenient for having 200 DVD's on hand at the press of a button, but honestly I never would have bought it if I wasn't looking for something to automate re-ripping all my CDs. For legal reasons it doesn't have a built in method for automatic DVD ripping, but there are some people working on fixing that. You can daisy chain 5 of these units together if you wanted, but honestly I don't know where I could put 4 more of them.

It's also a DVD burner, but so I haven't investigated that feature yet.

Sorry for the thread hijack, back to the Apple TV discussion. It's not clear to me what Apple TV does that is all that special.