[cbr600f4]

I need a bit of help. I am currently in process of ripping my DVD TV collection so I can use on the AppleTV I will eventually purchase. I am out of storage space on my desktop AND I would like the device the media is stored on to be continuously powered up. Since I have a G5 tower, that would require more power than I am willing to use for the process.

The solution I have come up with is to use the D-Link DNS-321 or DNS-323 as an iTunes Media Server. The only way I have found this to work from searching the web is using Boxee, which defeats the whole purpose of me getting the AppleTV, which is to use the simple interface without add-ons. I don't want to keep applying updates when they change the AppleTV software.

Thus I have two questions:

1) Has anyone had any luck using NAS devices with iTunes Media Server and AppleTV without needing a Mac to bridge the content?

2) Any suggestions other than Boxee that I am not considering?

The other devices out there claiming to be Media Servers are not even close to AppleTV...it is just the darn storage limit (160GB, are you kidding me?)

Thanks,

Nick

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by cbr600f4 

The solution I have come up with is to use the D-Link DNS-321 or DNS-323 as an iTunes Media Server. The only way I have found this to work from searching the web is using Boxee, which defeats the whole purpose of me getting the AppleTV, which is to use the simple interface without add-ons. I don't want to keep applying updates when they change the AppleTV software

I'm doing exactly this with Boxee. Don't discount it so quickly as a not-simple interface. The AppleTV interface isn't as simple as it used to be. And, there's a simple solution to not applying Boxee updates whenever Apple updates the AppleTV software: don't apply the AppleTV update. It's rare that they put anything new in there lately anyways. The only purpose for the last AppleTV update appears to be breaking Boxee.

[cbr600f4]

Does Boxee just add a menu or is it in a completely different area? If it just lists the files in the same place then I may not have an objection to it.

[Wiskedjak]

Boxee adds a menu item that loads a completely different OS. But, if you don't already know that, you shouldn't be dismissing the Boxee OS as "not simple" so soon. AppleTV's 1.x OS was excellent and straight-forward to use (even though many of the 1.x updates were very buggy). The 2.x OS feels like it was designed by an intern in 5 minutes using Visio.

I consider Boxee, as beta software, to be far better than the AppleTV 2.x interface. It does still have some wrinkles to iron out, but so does AppleTV. And what Boxee offers far outweighs, for me, any value of an Apple OS design:
- doesn't need an iTunes server to read media files from a directory.
- automatically grabs album/video art from the 'net
- automatically grabs media summaries from the 'net
- automatically sorts media files into TV, Movie and Music buckets
- automatically adds new content found in specified folders
- allows connected users to recommend content to each other
- facilitates access to Hulu, Last.fm, Joost, flickr, etc ...

It's obvious that Boxee is taking this media box thing seriously while it's only a hobby for Apple.