New Mac user with Mac mini to Apple TV questions

[guygardner2020]

Background:
Long story short I'm moving out soon and want to leave mom/dad an apple setup to cut down on malware/viruses and give my mother a setup that syncs easier then windows currently can. That said i am a complete first time Mac user. This Mac Mini was the first Mac device I have bought.

Current project:
I have a Mac Mini and I am pulling my files from a windows home server 2011(yes this was a learning process lucky for you i worked through it before i found this forum, although knowing me you will hear more on this at a later date).
I am looking at getting an Apple TV(ATV) to bridge my mini and the living room TV. As of now i do NOT care about viewing these files on an iPhone, iPod, or any other mac device. I say this because I do not want to jailbreak the ATV(and i do not want to convert my files). I am seeing a program called aTV Flash promising me everything I want and letting me avoid jailbreak and converting. Is the true, has anyone used it before, or do you have better solutions?

Over all this is the first of many upgrades, if you are interested I will update as I go (I am sure I will need help along the way anyway lol).

 

[linds15]

you have to pick between jailbreaking and converting. aTV Flash requires a jailbreak, so its not a solution to your problem. id go with converting, its time consuming at the beginning, but after you're done its easy to import and convert your new stuff going forward. id go the jailbreak route only if you already have an atv2, or are willing to wait for a atv3 jailbreak.

 

[guygardner2020]

Not trying to bump this but I never said thank you and I wanted to so, Thank you for the answer.

 

[apeekevo]

I used a jailbroken atv with all my media on a NAS, and it worked fine. I don't really see the big deal though. I actually stopped using xmbc and converted all my media to be compatible with iTunes, and haven't looked back. To me, taking the time to convert my media is worth it for things to "just work". Maybe I didn't use the xmbc to its full capacity, but beyond streaming my media, I was unable to get much else to work.

 

[saotomefirst]

Just adding my 2 cents. I'm another adept of the converting strategy. My parents had like 20 GB of home made videos that had to be converted before we could start using iTunes. It did take a looooong time to finish converting all that but after that we had no more trouble.

It's probably better for you to teach your parents how to convert any new videos as part of the process of importing videos to iTunes - this worked well for me, and this step could be skipped at a later stage if your family decides to start using iDevices to make their movies, like mine did