I need a little help...

As some of you may know, I will be going to madrid on april, and will take the opportunity to buy a lot of electronics that I want (mostly apple crap), besides my mbp, I'm still undecided on what to get for my brothers at home, a macbook or a mac mini, but that's besides the point.

We have a 720p capable lcd tv inside our living room, and we watch a lot of movies and tv shows on our computer. What I would like is a solution sort of like the apple tv that I can hook up to my tv and we can all watch whatever movie or tv show there, wirelessly. I know that I can hook up my mbp to the tv with a dvi to hdmi cable, but the tv is kinda far from where we would have all the computers, not to mention it's far easier if it's done wirelessly.

Now apple tv seems interesting, but is there anything better?

Now 90% of tv shows I download are mp4 or encoded in h264 in 720p or whatever. Most of it I get from other places, and the rest I download from iTunes. Is apple tv good for me? is the 40gb version enough? Should I just buy something else? Any help would be appreciated.

Also, for the small selection of movies I have that arent mpeg4 or h264, how hard/easy is it to encode them?

 

What happened to getting your brothers an iMac? Apple TV seems to be much better than it used to be. It would be wireless and you would be able to play all the things you download from iTunes on it. I would say for you it is worth it. I am not sure about how you would get other media onto it though.

 

Yeah I was going to get them an iMac, but it was too expensive, they had the base model for $2200, unacceptable.

Basically with apple tv I can play anything that is encoded in h264 or mp4 codecs right? Even if it is in 720p?

 

I'm not sure about the codecs, but yeah it's capable of 720p. Apple even talked about it being able to play the HD movie rentals from iTunes, so it should be able to play any HD.

 

Apple TV natively only supports h264 and MPEG4 encoded videos in m4v, .mp4, and .mov formats only. It can be hacked to support more (such as .avi or .mkv).

Personally, as I never stream video, I would rather get a Mac Mini, share the movies/videos/music/photos folders on other machines, and use Front Row (add a shortcut to the correct shared folder in the Mac Mini). With the Perian codec pack installed, Quicktime can pretty much play anything.

If you re-encode a video, you will lose quality. It is not difficult to convert video from one format to the other provided you have the correct encoders available. You can do them from Quicktime Pro.

May I also suggest that perhaps an iPod Touch would be a good idea for a gift. I am certainly having a lot of fun with mine.