Macbook, Apple TV, Mountain Lion

Works great under Snow Leopard and Lion

by Sugith - 3/9/12 5:09 PM

In Reply to: Why not explain by Jimmy Greystone

I use Apple TVs throughout the house to stream movies from the external HD connected to an iMac in an office/spare bedroom. AirPlay is here NOW and you don't have to wait for Mountain Lion. You may be confused with the mirroring feature for your Mac that Mountain Lion will have.

Streaming from my iMac wirelessly works very well and I've never had any hiccups though I do use an Apple Time Capsule as the network router. Any movie in iTunes can be streamed by Apple TV.

But you will have an issue having ripped your movies to .dvdmedia files. This is a proprietary format for RipIt. If you had ripped your movies and not used the .dvdmedia format, they could have easily been streamed to a 1st generation Apple TV that had been jailbroken with ATVFlash, which is what I use. Probably to a 2nd gen Apple TV using the ATVFlash for that, though I use Plex and Airplay to stream on the 2nd gen Apple TV.

The far easier solution is to convert your movies using Handbrake to iTunes friendly M4V files and select the Apple TV setting in Handbrake for them. After Handbrake converts them, they get copied to iTunes, (you can delete the version Handbrake made), and Apple TV will stream just like a movie off the iTunes store.

You CAN do convert your .dvdmedia movies, but you will have to get rid of the .dvdmedia folder they are in and move the .TS folders inside to a new folder named for the movie. Then use Handbrake to convert to iTunes friendly files. If the DVD contains supplemental material you'll have to convert them as separate titles.

The one loss will be the menu for the DVD. But the ease of watching the movie on Apple TV's usually outweighs that for me. If I really want the movie and menu I'll rip normally, (not using .dvdmedia format) and the Apple TV that's been jailbroken with ATV Flash can play them, menu and all. (Menu loading is slower than DVD but acceptable and the movie itself plays fine.)

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