Short Order Techout here there be geeks

*It is extremely important to be completely familiar with this material, the process, and the required software/resources needed to execute it properly before trying. As far as they go, this one is fairly long and complex. I have written this as simply as possible for someone who knows what they are doing. Remember that if at anytime you bork your AppleTV you can reboot it and hold MENU and – at the same time to do a factory restore*

What a typical day to take on a complex hacking project. I sat down, prepped, and put about an hour into this project. You know, just enough time to become fully committed when my kids begin bouncing between all out fighting as loud as they can and pounding on the piano. To add to the distraction, my wife needs me to help her move furniture so she can paint the laundry room, and in the midst of all of that, I screw up the hack and now my AppleTV boots into a black screen.

To recap progress thus far, the house is crazy and upside down, everyone needs something from me, and the AppleTV is FUBAR. Lets reset.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we used an Apple TV in our living room as the main source of on demand content. That is, until recently when I renovated our dining room into a Mac Mini driven Home Theater. Once the theater was complete, I found that the Apple TV in the living room began to slowly spiral into obsoleteness. Its not that we don’t watch TV in the living room anymore, its that we stopped watching downloaded content. Since AppleTV requires that all its content be MP4 and synced via an open iTunes library, I was previously converting every AVI/MKV/WMV/etc. etc. to MP4 before we could watch it. This was such a monumental pain in the ass that once we got Plex up and running on the Mac Mini, I just couldn’t bring myself to continue converting the content for the living room.

Well, I have been away for quite a while and, in that time, completed a couple of projects that were the epitome of blog worthiness but unfortunately, I didn’t blog them.  To try and get caught up and rolling again, I am going to dust off the blog and give the highlights of my latest project.  In a nutshell, we previously turned our dinning room into a play room for the kids which turned into a black hole for junk  and was a total waste of space.  Rather than converting it back to a dining room and sticking a table and six chairs we would never sit at in there, we opted to build ourselves a full on home theater system.

So, it was decided.  We would build a theater.  Luckily, I already had many of the needed components including 5.1 worth of 2003 Klipsch Reference speakers.  To power the speakers I used my old school Denon AVR-3805 which doesn’t have HDMI, but was too expensive to be expendable, and a 110″ screen from a theater I built in a previous home.  Aside from these major components I was also already packing the accessories like Xbox, PS3, Wii, and my Media library of 15000+ songs and 700+ DVDs ripped and stored on a Drobo.  The room, having been a play room, already had DirecTV service so, out of the gate, content was covered.

Having taken inventory of the items I had, it was time to figure out the items I would need.  Since my receiver didn’t have HDMI I would definitely need an HDMI switch that worked on remote to change sources and obviously, I was going to need a projector.  For the switch, I scooped up a Monoprice 5×1 HDMI switcher for some absurdly cheap price, $30.00 I think (Go Monoprice) and bundled that order with 150 feet of speaker wire, a couple of HDMI cables, and a universal ceiling mount for the projector.  With the basics out of the way, it was time to sit down and figure out what projector to use.  I begin by looking at the Optoma HD20 which was all abuzz around the net claiming to be a sub $1000.00 1080P projector.  While the stats on this little guy looked good, complaints of fan noise and the appearance of the word “Acceptable” over and over in the reviews, had me somewhat cautious of this device.  The noteworthy part of the HD20 reviews and articles were that almost every author referenced the Epson Powerlite Home Cinema 8100 as its step up and main competition.  After seeing this projector mentioned over and over, I pulled its specs, read several reviews, and decided it was the 1080P device for me so I sailed over to www.projectorpeople.com and picked one up.  

Okay, components and a projector out of the way, I had the body of my beast, but no brains.  I needed something to handle the online streaming and media library delivery, and while many think an Xbox/PS3 is that solution, I am not in that camp.  The choice, for me at least, was obvious.  I would need a Mac Mini.  At the time I was building this system, Apple had released the $999.00 Mac Mini Server which appealed to me because a regular Mini is $599-$799 stock, but configured for my Application, $799.00 was the more accurate price.  Subsequently,  a Snow Leopard Server License is $499.00 so picking up a bundle for $999.00 was a deal I couldn’t pass up.  For anyone else out there who isn’t as savvy with the Computer part of this built, the server license is so completely and totally unnecessary, don’t sweat it.  A regular Mac Mini with 4 gigs of memory will serve just fine.

So here we go, the gear is assembled, time to build it out.  As you can tell from the picture at the top of this post, the room was designed around my two little girls and about as far from my idea of “theater” as possible.  There was also one other minor stumbling block.  My wife.  As it turns out, the only way I could get her on board with this project was to double the theater room as my office and workspace thereby moving my current workspace into the newly designed theater.  This would mean a dismantling of all of my tech and toys on an epic scale.  My old office was to become a laundry room, a small price to pay for what I was about to start building.  I shouldn’t get ahead of myself though, before tearing all of this down, it was time to clear out the room, paint it, run the wires, and load in the gear.  I began the week before Thanksgiving, and worked all of my free time for about a week to complete the project.  That being said, it was only until recently that I actually called it “good” and have spent more time enjoying content than tweaking the gear.  Which is the more enjoyable is a matter of opinion.  I am sure I will find a reason to tear it all apart so that I can tweak it more in the near future.

The build out was simple.  I ran speaker wire in the wall and through the crawl space.  The HDMI and power for the projector was run tightly up the back corner of the room and over to the unit, .Charcoal Grey paint, curtains on the windows, some appropriately themed movie posters (it was Christmas time after all), a media stand I already had in another part of the house, and a smaller desk for my workspace.  The result? I have to say that my family spends almost all of our time in this room now.  The girls get to play Wii on a screen who’s diagonal is cumulatively longer than their combined height which blows their little minds, and 110″ of 1080 Disney Channel delivers wide open mouths and loads of excitement.  My wife is now having friends over every week for her Tuesday night line up and can now watch TV throughout the week while I am on my Mac working or playing.  Bringing the two of us into the same room while still letting us enjoy our own content is brilliant.  For myself, I have been jamming out with Beatles Rock Band and Modern Warfare 2 on the big screen, enjoying my movie collection, and generally drooling over Discovery HD theater every night since it was completed.  To anyone who is thinking “hmm, what the hell good is my dining room for?” I say tear it down and make yourself something amazing.  To any who reads this post and thinks there is no way you could build something like this, find me @bushwilliams on twitter or e-mail Sysop@shortordertech.com and we will make it happen.

The specs are as follows:

• 110″ 1080P HD Epson 8100 Projector Display
• 5.1 Klipsch system including: 2X RB-75s, 2x RS-7s, 1X RC-7, and a RSW-15 powered by a Denon AVR-3805
• Game Consoles: Xbox 360, PS3, Wii
• A Windows 7 PC / Hackintosh 2.66 Quad w/ 8GB of RAM, fully water cooled, sits beside the components to facilitate Blu-Ray and DVD Ripping as well as video encoding and the occasional Windows based video game.
• Direct TV HD DVR for Live Content
• Mac Mini Server 2.53ghz 4GB RAM connected to my media library (Drobo) via FW800 distributes content at 1080P via Plex as well as serves iTunes libraries to three other Apple TVs and Macbooks in the house.  This server runs TED (Torrent Episode Downloader) and wrangles all of our TV show torrents, streams Netflix, and provides crystal clear 110″ web browsing and Gaming.  The Mac is fully controlled via a Logitech Harmony 880 Remote and functions just like a regular AV component.  It has a small form factor and is absolutely fantastic for this application.

Additional Photos Below:

Component to HDMI in 3 parts.

1. HDMI to DVI-D.

2. DVI-I / D / A, three way converter

3. DVI-I to Component

All parts purchased at www.monoprice.com

Okay, time to test it out.

Update on Monday, August 31, 2009 at 7:49 PM by Bush Williams

errm… too bad it doesn’t work.

 Well, here we are at the third and final installment of our posts on how to create an Apple Home Theater System of your very own. In our last segment we discussed the Apple TV. We dubbed it the simpler solution to extend the iTunes store to the big screen, watch your ripped DVD collection, and bring all of your music and photos to the living room as well. Not wanting to dismiss the Apple TV as entry level and simple, we also mentioned a hack that would allow more file formats and various sources of streamed internet video to play by installing Boxee. Having now discussed the Apple TV in full, we can move on to our final option. This option being for those of us who need to, for better or worse, take it to the next level. The few masochistic geeks who want to toil over a project every bit as much as enjoy the final result. Ladies and Gentlemen, that option is the Mac Mini Home Theater.

Nearly eight months into using the Apple TV as my main home theater solution, a friend of mine purchased a Mac Mini and loaded it up with a program called Plex to serve as his media extender. I sat quietly for a few weeks to allow him enough time to really get some use out of it, occasionally dropping a “Hey, hows that Mini working out for you?” and always receiving words of praise in return. Well, after about six weeks and hearing the subject come up several times on Macbreak Weekly, I decided to take the plunge. Please note that when I say plunge, I mean it. The Apple TV is a stand alone product that once hooked up, for the most part, just works. The Mac Mini is a computer that requires all of the attention any computer would and uses third party software which opens the doors for extra variables, and the potential for extra frustration. On the plus side, it also allows total freedom of how your media is presented, the formats available for playback, as well as many other perks. With a Mac Mini as your media extender you will be able to surf the net on your TV, have access to any of your programs be they Photo, Video, Games, etc. This option is robust and the sky is the limit, so long as our willing to pay the occasional price. What is that price you ask? Well, inevitably software will freeze, you’ll need reboots, programs will require updates, and worst of all, your family will definately be calling you while your busy at work to help them figure out whats wrong with it. Its just the way it is, its going to happen. Heed my warnings now and mull them over carefully. I will expand on this a bit more in my conclusion.

Now, perhaps I got a bit ahead of myself. We still need to buy ourselves a Mini right? Well, we have to consider that out of the gate, there are a couple of hardware options available at the time of purchase. I chose to buy the barebones standard model from Apple and perform my own RAM upgrade. I however, am one of those masochistic geeks who enjoy inflicting unnecessary pain on myself. So, if like me, the idea of getting a putty knife to pop open the Mini, removing tiny little screws, a few pieces of tape, the WiFi antennas, the DVD assembly, the old memory, and then putting it all back together doesn’t sound like your bag, just buy it outright with four gigs of RAM. It is absolutely imperative to have four gigs of RAM on the Mini if using it for a home theater because this will bump your shared video memory from 128 Megs to 256, and provide a much cleaner picture.I am including a video from my favorite after market Mac supplier OWC or “Other World Computing” below that demonstrates this process, only you can decide if its worth the extra hundred bucks. Having gone through the process, I would likely say yes, but this wasn’t my first rodeo and if I had never seen the inside of a computer before I would have been crying crocodile tears on my huge pilla. As for processor and hard drive, its all in what you want to spend and / or upgrade third party. I went with the smallest of each as I plan to store my media externally to the Mini and even at 2.0Ghz, the processing power is plenty to playback video.

With that little adventure behind me, I used the included mini display port to DVI connection to run a DVI -> HDMI cable from my Mini to my receiver, got a bluetooth mouse and keyboard ready, and fired the little guy up. If you are not using HDMI to deliver audio and video, you will still want to run a DVI -> HDMI cable from the Mini into your TV and then purchase a TOSLINK cable (I prefer Monoprice.com) to send the digital audio to your receiver. Congratulations, at this point, you are up and running with a Mac Mini in 720 or 1080P video depending on your TV, as well as digital sound. Now its time to choose your preferred method of remote control and your presentation software. I personally use a Logitech Harmony 890for remote control and find it to be easy to use, reliable, and something the whole Family can master quickly. I find the $20.00 Apple Remote to be a nice little gadget, but as it wont change inputs and adjust volume, its a hard sell. For the iPhone / iPod Touch users in the crowd, I highly suggest “Snatch” for the iPhone. This App will allow you to download or create your own remote control interfaces as well as close and launch programs (very handy if they are locked up) and provides a keyboard and touchpad interface. Its pretty brilliant to be able to launch Snatch on your iDevice, browse your content as if your device was a remote control, and then close your media program, open up your browser, and have full mouse and keyboard support in the same App to control web surfing. In fact, I just removed the mouse and keyboard after about a week and used Snatch inclusively to control the entire experience. At $3.99 its a steal.

So now that you have your Mac Mini pumping through your stereo and displaying to the big screen in full HD, its time to drop in all of your content, locate a carbonated beverage, and bust out the Hot Tamales. But what are we going to use to present all of our content? Well, I chose Plex. I know Boxee is another popular option, but I haven’t had enough exposure with it to include it in this post. I will say that Plex is basically built off the same platform and my sole decision to try it first is how beautifully and clever it presents your content. I plan to write up a full review on Plex and Boxee in a sort of a head to head in the very near future, so I am not going to go too far into their inner workings now. The important thing is that prior to even considering a Mac Mini as a home theater I would download both of these programs (did I mention they are free?), load in your media, get a remote control working, and simulate the experience on your Macbook, iMac, or Mac Pro first. The Mini is going to set you back nearly six hundred more than an Apple TV before its all said and done and you can very cheaply and easily mock up the experience before shelling out the cash.

To conclude, I will give you my thoughts on the Mini vs. the Apple TV from first hand experience. Regardless of if you are new to Mac or know them inside and out, the fact is that the Mini is never going to be as stable as the Apple TV. True, the Apple TV can loose sync, needs an occasional reboot, and is generally at the mercy of another Mac to supply its content, but by the by, if something goes South, correcting it is fairly straight forward. You either reboot the Apple TV, or your open and close iTunes on the host Mac. Thats basically it for troubleshooting and unless you have some freak malfunction that requires using the warranty, those simple steps will fix it every time. The Mini on the other hand, while a joy to use, is subject to a third party program like Plex to present your media, which in my experience, isn’t stable enough to be left running all the time. So why not close it when I am done? Well, realistically that is not going to happen. I expect a solution rounding on $1000.00 to work when I want it to work yet inevitably two or three times a week I would get a call from the Family stating that they couldn’t watch movies. Luckily I could remote into the Mini from work and sure enough, Plex would be frozen and I would have to close it and re-launch. I am not trying to sound like I am dumping on Plex here, because its a fantastic program, but the fact is that its not designed to run 24/7 without intervention and in the end, thats what I expect from my media extension appliance. It is for this reason that I have moved my Mac Mini into my office and now use it as the media server rather than extender for our house. In its place I have added our third Apple TV much to the relief of the rest of my Family.

If you are on the fence between these two products, my final conclusion is to buy the Apple TV. If you are emerging into Mac or want a little enthusiast machine on the cheap, the Mac Mini is the coolest little computer I have ever owned. Its sitting beside me right now, serving up two iTunes libraries to our Apple TVs and managing all of our media via FW800 off my Drobo. I route all of my downloads through it, host my iPhoto library from it, and all the while it operates cool, silent, and without fuss, 24/7.Should the day arise that I want to try the Mini as my media extender solution again, its here waiting for me, but for now you will have to excuse me. I just downloaded the pilot of Warehouse 13 and the Apple TV awaits. Hope you have enjoyed this series and found them useful, as always we look forward to your feedback and questions. By the way, the technical specs for the Mini can be found here.

 Part I of our “Creating an Apple Home Theater” guide can be found here.  In this segment, we will explore the Apple TV as an option for someone who is looking for a simple solution to bring the iTunes Store and their own digital media to a television set near you. Sound interesting? Look no further than the Apple TV. This little media extenders primary function is to bring the iTunes storefront to your living room providing an easy way to rent or buy movies from your armchair. That being said, it also provides YouTube and Apple Movie Trailer access, as well as the ability to display FlickR, Mobile Me, or local photographs on the big screen. Regardless of if you want to rent War Games, pick up Cakes last album, or download last weeks episode of “The Big Bang Theory”, its all just a click away, right from the couch.

While it can not be denied that these features are convenient and easy to use, thats not why I bought an Apple TV. I have that DVD collection I spent a month ripping into video files and I want to stream them to the living room. How does that work? It all starts with a Mac running iTunes. (Windows machines will work as well, so if you must, I forgive you) All that needs to be done is to hook the Apple TV up to your set, connect it via built in wireless N or built in ethernet to your home network, and it will begin the initial setup. The last stage of setup will present you with a five digit PIN number. Once you have the PIN, launch iTunes on your computer and it will show that it has found a new Apple TV on the network. At this point the Apple TV appears in iTunes just like an iPhone or iPod would. You can now select, the media to sync to the Apple TV, be it movies, music, TV shows, pictures, or podcasts. Its worth clarifying that you will have full access to the entire contents of your iTunes library on the Apple TV. The items you choose to sync are simply copied to the Apple TV and are always available regardless of the host computer or ethernet availability. In short, you always have access to your synced items, where as the rest of your library is dependent on the host computer being on and connected. In fact, with such a small footprint, loading the Apple TV with your favorite movies and shows makes for a great companion to take in the car on long drives and double nice to have once you arrive at your destination.  Why fuss with DVDs in the car to keep the kids happy when you can just tote their favorite digital copies along?

To view all your recently ripped titles, use the included remote to browse down to “Movies” and then “My Movies” and you have access to all your titles, each sorted alphabetically by genre. Time to pop that popcorn. Keep in mind that you also have a choice of My Music, and My TV Shows as well.

Sounds easy right? Well, thats because it really couldn’t get more so.  It is worth mentioning that there are a few potential drawbacks to the Apple TV.  The Apple TV only displays 720P and 1080i resolution. Now if your like me and have an up converting HDMI port on your TV and haven’t forgotten that all of the source material we ripped was from a 480P DVD, this may or may not be a big deal.  I have to make a big footnote of this thought as I understand that I am sometimes the minority who is absolutely fine with 720P.  I could hardly tell the difference on my old 110″ projector, let alone my 46″ LCD but that is a can of worms for another time.  A minor drawback is once again the fact that this device will require connectivity to a computer with iTunes open and should this connection be lost, only your synced content is available.  Now perhaps the largest pain is that the Apple TV, without any hacks (oh yes, there are hacks) will only play Apple formatted video, specifically MP4 and M4V files.  A proper DVD ripper that can rip to an Apple TV friendly format will be required and if you already have a large library of AVI or MKV files, they are going to need to be converted.  Luckily the conversion process is easy and can be performed from a variety of different software, I myself prefer Quicktime Pro.  On average a two hour movie takes about thirty minutes and a half hour TV show takes 10 – 15 minutes to convert form an *.AVI file so its not too bad (our conversions were performed on a quad-core tower @2.6GHz).  As I recently mentioned, there is and easy way to add Boxee and XMBC to your Apple TV which adds Hulu, Comedy Central, support for many other file types, and many other sources of streamed content from the internet.  Keep in mind that Apple will release a firmware update for the Apple TV every now and then that breaks this feature but the community bounces back pretty fast with a new version. 

Now to wrap this entry with an example of how I am using the Apple TV in my home and highlight why I am so fond of it.  I have built this system over the last year and have found it to not only be rock solid and reliable but also, in terms of what I have built, very affordable.  I am currently using three Apple TVs at the house.  I have one in each of my girls bedrooms, and one in our living room.  I am using a Mac Mini as a home server which hosts our iTunes Library.  The Mini is attached to a Drobo that currently provides two terabytes of storage for my media collection.  In the year that I have been doing this, I have consolidated all of my media and currently have 900 TV shows, 600 DVDs, my home videos, 12,000 songs, and 4,000 photographs all available instantly on the Apple TV.  As a parent, I have to be always mindful of what my children are exposed to on the TV, and I definitely have a considerable collection of media that is above and beyond inappropriate for a two year old and a six year old.  The reason I like the Apple TVs in their bedroom is because I can provide them with all of their, yet none of my, content and all without fussing over parental controls.  Sure the parental control option is there, but I have found a great way to bypass it and make their experience even better.  By enabling the “Fast User Switch” function on the computer serving iTunes, you can run multiple instances of iTunes by logging in multiple user accounts on the Mac.  This allows me to have a “Master iTunes” account for the living room Apple TV to sync with that contains all of our content, and a “Girls iTunes” login who’s iTunes library only contains the shows that are appropriate for them.  This is fantastic because when they browse their Apple TV libraries, they can watch anything available without any concern on my part.

I find that the Apple TV is a simple solution for users of any level.  You can plug it up and it “just works” or you can hack it with Boxee and get gnarly with it, there are plenty of possibilities.  While speaking of possibilities for Apple Home Theater though, much like Skywalker, there is another.  If you absolutely want to create yourself something fully custom, without any limitations, and put the power of a full blow computer on your television set, the Apple TV just isn’t going to be for you.  If you want to take it to the next level with all the pro’s and con’s there in, the power user and control geek will want to fire up a Mac Mini Home Theater System and in our next segment, we will explore that option in detail.

The Apple TV comes standard with Wireless N, Gigabyte Ethernet, HDMI, Component Video, Optical Out, and a USB port.  The full tech specs can be found here at Apple’s Website.

Two years ago, my family moved from Missouri back to my home town of Little Rock, Arkansas. I love it here in Little Rock, but there are two things that I will always miss from our old place, the first being my reef aquarium and the second being the home theater. Our previous house had a windowless basement so it was the perfect canvas to create what was, at the time, my dream home theater project.  I had a1080P projector throwing to a 110” screen that was accompanied with a full 7.1 Klipsch Reference Series speaker system, booming with a dual 15”, 2500 watt sub. A Denon AVR-3805 powered the whole thing and if you were pregnant, had a heart condition, or even a bad back, you couldn’t step foot in the basement during the first ten minutes of “Master and Commander” as it would pose a serious threat to your health.  On the back wall of the theater I built in a custom reef aquarium that, when not watching movies, I found myself mesmerized by, unable to peel my face from the glass. It was an incredible room, and I am glad to have had the experience of building it, unfortunately, our new house in Little Rock just isn’t able to accommodate those luxuries. The reef and the projector were left behind and now we have a living room with a really big sound system and a 46” Bravia over the fireplace.

 With some light now shed on my AV roots, it is easy to see how going from a setup like that to an ordinary living room just isn’t going to work. A television, some speakers, and a receiver leaves no room for tinkering. What is the good of setting something up if it does not allow you the pleasure of constantly tweaking it and every so often tearing it completely apart and rebuilding the whole thing? After the first few months in the new house I found myself going mad. I don’t want to watch TV nearly as bad as I want to innovate how I watch TV. So it was, to my good fortune, that I converted to Apple around that time. A few of my co-workers had Apple TVs and were ripping their DVD collections to Apple formatted files to be streamed across a home network, to their televisions. They accomplished this by using a computer running iTunes on the back end to store the files and an Apple TV hooked up to their televisions on the front end to display the files. This instantly got my attention and it wasn’t a month later that I had an assembly line going, ripping over 400 DVDs to video files. I setup my old PC with four DVD drives and used Handbrake to queue up the disks four at a time. Every few hours I would connect to my PC from work via remote login, eject the trays, and have my wife stick in four more DVDs. We had a great process and it wasn’t nearly as monumental a task as you would think. The process of using a program like Handbrake to rip DVDs is not necessarily complex, but varies from software to software and is not the purpose of this entry. We are going to assume that our readers have some previous knowledge of how to rip a DVD to a file and not bog ourselves down with that particular part of the process. If there are any questions on setting up a program like Handbrake to rip DVDs, leave us some feedback and we will gladly get back to you with specifics.  As each DVD was ripped to a file, I would then run MetaX and tag them so that each movie appeared to be an exact digital copy of the disc once added to my iTunes Library.  The process is basically the same as tagging an MP3 to show album art and detailed info, but for video files rather than music.

MetaX really is the key to this process and its absolutely free.  This program allows you to write data into an Apple formatted video file (MP4, M4V) so that when it is displayed in iTunes or on an Apple TV, it will provide everything from Cover Art to the full cast, crew, release date, rating, the DVD chapter titles, and a description of the movie. You can see a photo of “Master and Commander” displayed on my Television after processing the file with MetaX.  It really adds a level of polish that transforms the project from simply watching computer files on your TV to virtually flipping through a DVD catalog that includes as much detail as you wish to be displayed. Speaking of entering the data, I don’t want it to be conveyed that using MetaX involves the gross input of tons of data. When you open a video file with MetaX, you can search the title of the Movie or TV  Show within the actual program and if a tag already exists, as they often do, you simply use that data. In some cases, if a tag does not exist, referencing IMDB.com or an online DVD retailer will provide all the information needed to cut and paste a perfect tag.  

It didn’t take ripping more than a few dozen DVDs to realize  that I was going to need a good system for keeping them organized.  The file structure for this project involved creating a folder called “Movies” where I chose to store all of my video. Within that folder I created additional folders for the various genres such as “Action”, “Sci-Fi and Fantasy”, “Drama”, etc. Inside each of those folders I would once again create a final folder with the Title of the up in a keyed fire proof safe at work so that if all this hard work were ever lost I can easily restore it. It is also important to bear in mind that when you are watching these videos, they are streaming from the computer or device on which they are stored. It will therefore be necessary to make sure you have a device that can be on at all times when you want to be able to watch your content.

To summarize and give a few final thoughts, we have identified a computer capable of holding our videos that can be left on when we want to have access to them that is also a part of our home network. We have chosen our DVD ripping software of choice and ripped all of our DVDs to an Apple compatible video format (H.264 M4V) and we have tagged all of these files (optional but recommend) so that they display impressively in iTunes and on our Television sets. All of these files have been organized and filed away in an easy to reference manner, and now its time to get down to business.

With my DVD collection ripped, tagged, and filed by genre, stage one of creating an Apple Home Theater is complete. All of our videos are now just a dark room, a bowl of popcorn, and means of display away from entertaining us in widescreen with Dolby Digital. So how about that means of display? Well, I have used both an Apple TV and a Mac Mini to accomplish this and in the next post we are going to start in on the simpler solution that provides impressive results, The Apple TV.