Apple TV for Mum and Dad

[barnetto]

Hi everyone

It's my parents' joint birthday in September and they have a Panasonic plasma 1080i set and no Internet (!) connection hence no wireless or wired network.

I would like to buy them an ATV, fill it with their music and some movies and photos from my collection when I visit and leave them to it to watch the locally stored content (I will get a 160gb) until the next time I visit when I can refresh it with my Mac.

So, given they don't have a network, questions are:

1) Will the MacBook and ATV talk to each other without a network, either wirelessly, or for speed, ethernet cable?

2) If yes, and I get their ATV filled up, will the ATV look for a network / display a nag screen if there isn't one?

3) Anything else I should consider?

I have looked at various products, but the Front Row interface is usable by my Mum and it plays nice with my iTunes library / Handbrake apple universal encodes etc., so I'm convinced ATV is the way to go.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[yoyo5280]

So, given they don't have a network, questions are:

1) Will the MacBook and ATV talk to each other without a network, either wirelessly, or for speed, ethernet cable?
Omi says: No
2) If yes, and I get their ATV filled up, will the ATV look for a network / display a nag screen if there isn't one?
Omi says: Sometimes
3) Anything else I should consider?
Apple TV is pretty useless w/out internet...but it very simple. If you can get them connected to the internet and they don't already have a TV provider, they will love the apple tv for its simple on demand.

Answers in bold

 

[RumMunkey]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.19.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.2 Safari/530.19)

I don't know about #1. I think you can plug an Ethernet cable directly from AppleTV to your MacBook without a router.

 

[geoffreak]

1) Will the MacBook and ATV talk to each other without a network, either wirelessly, or for speed, ethernet cable?

You cannot connect two devices over IP without a network. You should be able to use an ad hoc network though. A direct Ethernet connection will work for a wired network.

2) If yes, and I get their ATV filled up, will the ATV look for a network / display a nag screen if there isn't one?

When you sync the ATV with iTunes, you either tell it to only read content of its own drive or off the iTunes library it is connected to. The former won't show any content that isn't on the drive and the latter requires a constant connection to the computer with the iTunes library

3) Anything else I should consider?

AppleTV doesn't work without an internet connection. Get a Mac Mini or another device which can read content off an external drive that you can put the content on. If you go with the Mac Mini, use Plex instead of Front Row to play any and all content you have.

 

[barnetto]

Thank You

Thanks for all the advice people, very welcome. I was going to create an ad-hoc network and store music, photos and video on the ATV itself so thanks for saving me from purchasing something which wouldn't have been suitable.

I will purchase a cheap media player instead.

Thanks again