I love using my Airport Express to wirelessly play my music.
I have a projector at home, and I would like to wirelessly play my movies, which were not downloaded with iTunes.
I was considering purchasing an AppleTV for this purpose. Do you think it is a good solution for my material which is not iTunes-related?
Best Answer
Depends a lot on what file formats you've got and what sort of quality you're expecting. If your library is mostly h.264 format (typically mp4, m4v, and most mkv files) then the Apple TV should work pretty well for you.
Anything in an mkv container will need to be converted to an mp4/m4v container, but that can be done losslessly most of the time (i.e. no transcoding of video, just extracting the component streams and muxing them into an mp4 container - you may need to transcode the audio, but that's easy and quick to do).
If you have a lot of non-h.264 stuff (i.e. anything in .avi, DIVX, etc.), you'll need to transcode it, which means losing some quality and can use up a fair bit of CPU power. You can transcode ahead of time using a tool like Handbrake, or you can try transcoding on-the-fly, which requires less planning ahead, but for HD files you'll need a pretty beefy CPU, and the process is pretty haphazard. You can view the steps for doing that in my answer to Can I stream any video played with VLC player to Apple TV ?
Transcoding ahead of time also has the advantage of being able to use iTunes as a library, so you can access the files directly from the Apple TV. This applies to other files as well - if you can get them in iTunes compatible format (basically any mp4/m4v as above), your life will be a lot easier, as you can access them directly from the Apple TV, rather than going to your computer and streaming them to the Apple TV.
Finally, if you weren't aware of this already, you will need a computer running iTunes on at all times you want to access your library, unless you're playing files from the iTunes Store or Netflix.