I am ripping all of my DVD's, so we no longer need to use the discs. My questions is what is the easiest, cleanest way for the kids to be able to flip through the collection and watch movies? AppleTV, XBMC, Boxee, NitoTV?

I have the means to either connect a external hard drive direct to AppleTV or stream it off a 1TB network drive.

Anyone have young kids and could recommend a setup?

thanks in advance.

CWD

I have a 6 year old who can use ATV. I have all her movies 100+ loaded on a USB drive (500GB) directly attached to the ATV, and I use ATVFiles to display the covers etc. I didn't use NitoTV for the main reason that I like the way the ATVFiles shows the movie folders in the main (home) screen, rather than having to click a few times to get to the folder.

Jking,

Thanks for the response and I like your idea and was actually my first attempt, but I came across two issues and maybe someone can help me.

1) I have .m4v files and when I attempt to watch them via ATVFiles, I get no video, but full audio. I have Perian installed, and do not have issues viewing these files on xbmc. My movies are connect through USB drive.
2) How do I get the artwork covers? Through Sapphire? I have not attempted yet, until I know I can get the ATVFiles working properly.

I am running Take 2 ATV (2.3.1) and used patchstick with atvusb-creator-1.0.b10. Everything else is running perfect, except for my movies on ATVFiles.

CWD

Interesting, I have quite a few m4v files, and they play flawlessly through ATVFiles. How are you encoding them? Handbrake?
I have used the ATV since v2.0 (prior to that used a hacked xbox running XBMC), and haven't had any problems playing my files.

As for the artwork, I generally do some manual copy from the web rather than using Sapphire. Takes a bit of time to catch up, but worth it to get it right with higher quality. I go here mainly IMP Awards - All the Latest Movie Posters
Then I save the artwork as a jpg in the movie folder for ATVFiles to read. I also use AppleTV DataMaker for movie meta data. It works ok, but not that great.

Hope this helps.

Jacqueline

Edit: For your issue about paying m4v files, did you happen to select Mplayer as your default h.264 player when setting up instead of using Apple Quicktime?

jking,

solved the issue...i think. I reinstalled Perian and selected the "apple h.264". not sure how this will affect other stuff, but my movies are playing perfectly.

another side question for you - how do you have the menu set up for the kids movies?

Can you re-arrange the main menu on ATV to have the ATVFiles as the first option, or maybe automatically default to the movies section of ATVfiles?

my main goal is that the kids can find the movies easy and quick. ideas? also can you setup cover flow with the ATVFiles?

thanks again...CWD