Anyone dropped windows media center for apple solution?

[Mattgeorge]

Well I've kept media center pcs for a long time now and am getting bored with it. I have about 12 terabytes of blu ray and multiple computers connected to tvs indiffeerent rooms. I'm finding i buy a bluray load it on my media center and never watch it again. I dropped cable and use Netflix and hulu for tv.


Over the weekend I picked up an apple tv and am really enjoying the simplicity of the device. The only major problem is no hulu which can be resolved by jail breaking. Granted it's far from elegant.

After thinking about it I'm wondering if I should just setup a Mac mini as an iTunes server and slap an apple tv on each tv. This would eliminate the piles of equipment, heat and electricity that my current setup draws.


Anyone here ditched a full fledged media center for appletv? Anything u miss? Regrets?

 

[krburrell]

That's what I did. Ditched windows media center and got a mini and a apple tv for each room. Saved a lot on the electric bill. I also found that only watch a movie once and never look at it again. Now I'm debating how much storage I should really have for movies.

 

[blueroom]

Former Windows user since 3.1 yet I never liked Windows Media Center. I also use any computer running iTunes as an ATV2 server.

 

[Bill.the.Cat]

That's what I did. Ditched windows media center and got a mini and a apple tv for each room. Saved a lot on the electric bill. I also found that only watch a movie once and never look at it again. Now I'm debating how much storage I should really have for movies.

A simple rule that I like is that once your current storage is full, you start deleting unwatched content. I find it's always easy to open up plenty of space when I delete things that I haven't watched more than once. It's a lot cheaper than buying more storage. I do find we hang on to a lot of kids' material as they love to re-watch stuff.

And to the OP's main question, I ditched my Windows-based HTPC a while back and now rely on a hacked ATV1 (with external USB storage) as a media/iTunes server and multiple ATV2's to stream content.

 

[poundman]

Agree ditch it. Atv is simple if you format video to mp4 and you can reuse on any I device

 

[Nightarchaon]

made the jump years ago from a media centre PC to a 1st gen apple TV and never looked back, even did a manual uipgrade of the ATV HDD to give it more space, so my setup is now,

ATV1 hacked to run leapord acting as an itunes server connect to a DROBO for storage.

ATV1 connected to TV in lounge with upgrade HDD, i load movies and films onto this drive and take it around to friends houses for movie and beer nights.

ATV2 in master and spare bedroom

iPad and home sharing for watching in the garden or the kitchen or on the loo

 

[duervo]

I still have a mixture of Microsoft/Apple. My setup is a virtualized Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS2011) on VMware ESXi 4.1U1. The media is stored in that VM on a local hardware-based RAID5 array of 4 * 2TB drives, backed up nightly to an external iSCSI JBOD solution.

If I wasn't using the VMware ESXi host for other things such as work stuff, and home-based DNS, etc. I would probably ditch the WHS2011 and go the Mac Mini/ATV2 route. However, since I need the ESXi host for the work-related stuff anyway, I may as well make use of it for the WHS2011 too while I'm at it.

To view the media around the house, I have an Xbox360 in one room, an ATV2 in the living room (next to a PS3), and an iPad2 that floats around from room to room.