Streaming Video Recommendation

[bielen]

I'm looking to purchase an Apple TV and want to pair it with a device that I can stream. I've been researching various NAS units, but cannot find anything that will stream to the AppleTV as iTunes needs to be running.

I found the HP MediaSmart servers which seem to do what I want? Would a Mac Mini with an external RAID be a better option albeit more costly?

Basically I want to stream DVDs and content stored on hard drive that I originally shot with a camcorder?

My other final thought is to purchase a 160GB AppleTV and just transfer the content to the AppleTV and be done for now. I can always upgrade if Apple comes up with a true media server in the future.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Thanks

Mike

 

[Sky Blue]

get a 40 gb Apple TV and upgrade the drive yourself.

 

[mr1970]

It all depends on your budget. Personally I'd avoid upgrading the ATV hard drive and get something else to act as a server.

I got a bargain on a Gigabit Ethernet G4 tower running Tiger on eBay, added a Sonnet PCI card and 2 x Western Digital Black 1TB drives, set them to mirror using Disk Utility and now have a robust server which has all the space I'm likely to need for a couple of years. It also functions as a print server and occasional internet terminal, and has a firewire hard drive hanging off the back which is partitioned to hold Time Machine backups for my laptop and my wife's. Next step is to get VNC running so that I can administer it remotely where necessary.

It streams video perfectly well over a home powerline network - never had a glitch.

It's also the nicest machine I've ever worked on - very very easy to add drives, memory, clean it out etc etc.