setting up Apple tv

lilbandit

lilbandit

I hate Meath
Hi everyone, just after purchasing my first house so looking to set up some type of media system. I think Apple tv fits the bill but I have a few questions that I can't find answers to.
Firstly I'm going to use my G5 powermac to serve content. This doesn't have an 'n' enabled wireless connection and my existing router is 'b/g' enabled only. So I was going to purchase a new Apple Extreme Base Station and connect the G5 via ethernet to this. Could the Apple Tv box connect to the Base Station wirelessly and still allow the Apple Tv system to function as intended/advertised? Is an 'n' class network needed for the system to perform as intended?
Secondly, I have a large stock of movies encoded in a variety of formats. Most are .mpg/.mpeg/.mov/.mp4. These were encoded using Handbrake with default options (sometimes 2 pass encoding). In terms of managing these through iTunes, do they have to be re-encoded or altered in any way? I tried importing some encoded movies but playback in iTunes is extremely choppy
Thanks in advance for any help!
 
802.11n or an ethernet connection is required to stream H.264 video across. all other stuff is 'sync'ed, and so it doesn't matter what connection you have, just how much time you've got.
 
The only thing about the new Airport Extreme base station is that it doesn't have gigabit ethernet, so you'll be bottlenecked there (wireless N will be faster than a traditional 100mbs network). You could avoid that bottleneck if you purchased a wireless N router that supported gigabit networking.
 
Thanks for your replies, I'll look into it. Just read the Macworld review and at the moment a lot is missing from the product. No PVR, expensive, small hard drive, no tv tuner and the Netgear eva8000 seems to offer a lot more functionality and compatibility.
 
Macworld have quoted the Eva8000 as direct competition...different if you mean it offers more than AppleTv?
 
Well... AppleTV is all about putting iTunes content on a TV set. That's simply no competition for _anything_ with a TV tuner and recording capabilities. Completely different in my opinion.
 
well, no, it searches your network and finds all the media it can find, it then builds itself a library and makes it navigable from your tv. it streams video, music and photos from your macs or pcs and beams it to your tv, wirelessly. sans the actual use of iTunes software, it does the exact same job. as usual, the main advantage of apples hardware is the software, but that doesn't mean that this isn't a very worthy competitor, even offering features that appletv could very well benefit from, like PVR.
 
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