Worth getting an Apple TV?

[Anastacio]

It's a rather basic question, probably answered a ton of times - though every person has a unique setup. Here's the thing; I got a Mac Mini 2010 in my room upstair with Plex and some movies on a Harddrive connected to the said Mac Mini.

I'm thinking of getting an Apple TV 2010 and put it in the living room. Though, what use will I get out of it? I'm located in Denmark so I won't have Netflix and I'm not interested in renting/buying movies on iTunes. I do have iTunes on my Mac Mini with various music.

What I would ultimately like is to be able to watch the movies I got upstairs on the Apple TV downstairs - and use Airplay as well. Problem would seem to be, that my harddrive isn't wireless, so I won't be able to stream my HD movies and subtitles to the Apple TV, correct?

Can the harddrive (via USB) be connected to a Wireless n router and stream the content to the Mac Mini and Apple TV? I have heard about Plex if I jailbreak it, does it support subtitles like on Mac?

If these options aren't available, then another one would be to hardcode subtitles onto the movies and add them to iTunes, hence set it up for Home Sharing. That wouldn't be optimal as that would take up double the space on either the Mac Mini or the Harddrive itself. Do you guys have any suggestions?

 

[KeithJenner]

I don't know about Plex and subtitles, but don't see any reason why your setup wouldn't stream from your external HDD to the Apple TV via iTunes on your Mac Mini. You would of course need to have the Mini on to do this.

That will allow you to access the videos and films that are in a format Apple TV can play.

 

[Anastacio]

I don't know about Plex and subtitles, but don't see any reason why your setup wouldn't stream from your external HDD to the Apple TV via iTunes on your Mac Mini. You would of course need to have the Mini on to do this.

That will allow you to access the videos and films that are in a format Apple TV can play.

But that's the problem, I will have to copy all the movies to a format iTunes read, thus having two copies of each film lying around my harddrive - that is not optimal. =/

 

[KeithJenner]

But that's the problem, I will have to copy all the movies to a format iTunes read, thus having two copies of each film lying around my harddrive - that is not optimal. =/

OK, your post didn't make that clear. In that case then jailbreaking would be your only option for the Apple TV. In my opinion, if you're going to do that then you may as well buy something different that plays them straight off.

The point of my post though was that your Hard drive not being wireless isn't an issue if it is connected to your Mini. Just share it from that.

 

[Anastacio]

OK, your post didn't make that clear. In that case then jailbreaking would be your only option for the Apple TV. In my opinion, if you're going to do that then you may as well buy something different that plays them straight off.

The point of my post though was that your Hard drive not being wireless isn't an issue if it is connected to your Mini. Just share it from that.

Yea, that's the Home Sharing thing I'm writing about in my post. =)
If I jailbreak the Apple TV (which I would have done in any case) would I be able to stream my movies to the Plex app from my Mac Mini?