Hello my friends,

I am relatively new (almost two years) to MAC and I love it. I've installed on an Intel based PC with the generous help from this forum the Leopard and I am very happy with it. I am kind of newbie and not very familiar with terminal commands but I could follow instructions and in the past I was successful using it.

I bought an AppleTV, hacked it, loaded tons of movies but I am a little disappointed in terms of hardware capabilities. I can not play MKV movies encoded in 720p or higher. I download 720p movies in MKV, then convert them to MV4 or MP4 to be able to play them on AppleTV but I found very difficult to add subtitles and not to mention that it is a lot of time consuming for conversion.

Therefore, I am looking into building my own HTPC or PC/Media to be more capable and be OK to play HD movies in MKV format, even 1080 movies too. I already have a PC enclosure in a small format with 350W power supply. It fits a small format motherboard (9.5x9.5") and found one with HDMI output, video card integrated and a good prcessor(AMD). Model number: ASUS M3A78-EM
I wish to ask your opinion and advice:
- Should I go for it and then install Leo on it?
- Or should I focus more on Intel based MB?
- I wish to add a dongle infrared that I have to be able to control for instance the VLC player by remote. Are the drivers accessible? Is it possible?
- I wish to add a bluetooth dongle that I have to be able to connect a mouse and keyboard. Is it possible, easy to do?
- And again, is it possible to install on top of Leo the AppleTV software or similar, so I could access the same features as I have now with AppleTV and make it easy for wife?