Question about possible 2G Apple TV setup.

[nickfinity]

First of all, I've lurked on MacRumors for years and finally made an account.

I purchased a 2G Apple TV from Amazon yesterday and will receive it tomorrow. Now, I know in order to play videos from your computer that it needs to be streamed through iTunes. This requires the computer to be on all the time while streaming. To be honest, I don't have my MBP on all the time.

I was looking at buying a very cheap barebones desktop computer to use for iTunes streaming and NOTHING else. I would have this computer on all the time for quick access. This doesn't mean it will be streaming all the time.

I have $105 in Amazon Credit that I need to use, so I will need to purchase it there. I have 2.5'' and 3.5'' SATA drives that I already have that I can throw in there.

Would this one be good enough for what I intend on using it for? I have a spare license of Windows XP that I will use as the OS. How much RAM do you think I should have, 2gb or 4gb?

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[RyanPlugs]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

I'm thinking of doing this with a netbook and an external hard drive (at least until my collection outgrows it) and people have said the system will be more than capable.

2GB should be fine, as the Apple TV is doing all the hard work, the computer is just serving it files.

 

[newagemac]

It only needs to be able to run iTunes. Even 1GB will be fine with Windows XP.

 

[MacDane]

It only needs to be able to run iTunes. Even 1GB will be fine with Windows XP.

Is this confirmed? Just curious because I have an Atom 230 PC with ION and 2GB RAM that I could use for my home setup. If I understand you correctly, the iTunes computer just serves the file to AppleTV which then does the hard work, which means that the Atom should be fine even for Handbrake High Profile HD files?

Ohhh I would love to have a low watt iTunes server

 

[mstrze]

Is this confirmed? Just curious because I have an Atom 230 PC with ION and 2GB RAM that I could use for my home setup. If I understand you correctly, the iTunes computer just serves the file to AppleTV which then does the hard work, which means that the Atom should be fine even for Handbrake High Profile HD files?

Your PC will essentially just be sending the file to the AppleTV for playback locally...streaming data, yes, but there is enough of a buffer on the ATV to store enough of the file to avoid any hiccups. Your PC is really not playing back the file, just sending it out to the ATV2 which 'does the hard work'.

 

[MacDane]

Thanx a lot

Now I know what to do this weekend (except that New Year's Eve may mean that I have to spend most of the weekend becoming something resembling a human being again)

 

[nickfinity]

I found a really old desktop with 128mb of ram in it. Will that be enough ram to do this? Haha