Upload content to Apple TV

My iTunes music folder and all of my movies (in separate folders) are on an external drive. In fact, it's a NAS RAID box, but it's mounted on my Mac mini.

You just have to load the movies into iTunes. When you do, they'll be visible to the Apple TV. Of course, they have to be in the MP4/M4V favored by Apple. If you want to watch AVIs, etc., you'd have to "hack" your Apple TV. Haven't done this, but it sounds pretty easy these days.

Maybe we'll get an ATV Apps Store soon, and it will be easy to load other apps and stream all sorts of stuff to the ATV...

As seen on Apple website, the supported video formats are:

• H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

• MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

• Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format

So in order to play your DivX movies you have either to transcode them into a supported format using tools like Handbreak, or to jailbreak it so it will support more video formats.

In my humble opinion, Apple TV is the best device for streaming music, listening/watching podcasts, streaming your photo libraries from your mac to your TV, and if you are an iTunes store fanatic then buying/renting movies from the iTunes store.

If your main interest is watching divx/mkv's, then I would suggest you to look for something else.