Streaming Movies to TV

[CaptainCannabis]

Hello my Apple Geeks/Geniuses/Fans,

Firstly, apologies if this is not the correct forum for this thread.

I recently purchased an iMac for my brother, (something I’m completely unused to, as I’ve always had a Mac laptop).

He has a huge collection of .AVI movies and other formats which are unsupported by AppleTV, is there any way or any other product he can use to see the movies on the TV? (By streaming them to the TV somehow).

I would greatly appreciate your feedbank.

Regards
Captain Cannabis

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

You may want to try searching the forums, there are many threads covering this. Your options are determined by which generation of Apple TV you have - the IOS version or the older one? I think either way you can get what you want.

If you want to play just about any video file on your Mac, get VLC player. Out of the box, it plays everything, and it can also support video streaming / transcoding on the fly - there are also other media-server programs that can transcode on the fly into formats that are compatible with your Apple TV.

 

[CaptainCannabis]

You may want to try searching the forums, there are many threads covering this. Your options are determined by which generation of Apple TV you have - the IOS version or the older one? I think either way you can get what you want.

If you want to play just about any video file on your Mac, get VLC player. Out of the box, it plays everything, and it can also support video streaming / transcoding on the fly - there are also other media-server programs that can transcode on the fly into formats that are compatible with your Apple TV.

Hi Big-TDI-Guy

Thanks for your response.
So basically, I can use VLC to transcode a movie on the fly to my AppleTV?
Does AppleTV need anything installed?

Thanks!

 

[McFunkerson]

Hi Big-TDI-Guy

Thanks for your response.
So basically, I can use VLC to transcode a movie on the fly to my AppleTV?
Does AppleTV need anything installed?

Thanks!

I want to help clarify, VLC will not stream to the AppleTV. The only thing the AppleTV is capable of streaming from out of the box is iTunes, and then only videos is a format the AppleTV is compatible with. I'm hoping in the future the AppleTV gains it's own App store and then something like AirVideo would be able to do on the fly transcoding to AppleTV like it does tot he iPad.

Right now if you want an AppleTV you'd have 2 choices. The first would be to jailbreak the AppleTV and install XBMC on it which would be able to stream a file share of videos in most formats. The set back here is that it's complicated, I'm not sure if there is an untethered jailbreak for the latest AppleTV iOS version (which means if it loses power you'd have to hook it back up to your computer) and if there are updates to the AppleTV you have to avoid them until the hacking community can jailbreak it again.

The second option would be to transcode all of your videos to .mp4s so iTunes can stream it to the AppleTV. Handbrake is a wonderful app for transcoding, it's fast and produces high quality transcodes with the default AppleTV settings. A good addition to Handbrake is an app called Magic Media Marker which will automated Handbrake, and also the process of downloading artwork and other metadata so your videos look nice when they get into iTunes.

 

[nanosour]

A good alternative which i currently use it Fuze. Download at Fuze.com. It has an iTunes plug-in which will convert your .avi files and place the .mp4 files into the iTunes/Movie folder for selection on your TV menu. Works awesome and is quick at Transcoding movies. 1.35 GB in about 12 minutes on my i7 iMac.

All you have to do is place the .avi files into the Azureus Downloads Folder that Fuze creates in your Documents Folder. Then drag them to the iTunes selection on the left side of the Fuze application.

It's very easy and movies look great on my TV 1st Generation. Will stream just as well on TV2

GL with the new iMac.


Nano