apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

My husband and I switched from using the Mac Mini to the iTV when it came out. Our TV is a 30" Dell monitor and we get all of the TV we watch from iTunes.

The biggest reason why we switched is because the Mini just wasn't powerful enough. Period. However, the iTV has its downfalls when it is your only source of TV watching. We love the interface and ease of use for watching things off of iTunes. It's definitely got the Mini beat in that aspect. The really big problem that we have encountered now: watching DVDs. My husband didn't do a large amount of research into this aspect before purchasing it. We can't connect our DVD player up to it and the adapter to do so is over $300.

I still prefer the iTV over the Mini, though. We no longer have a wireless keyboard and mouse always taking up space on our coffee table. We can watch content stream smoothly over our wireless network. We can rip most movies on another computer and then watch them using the iTV.

I have to ask, what's the advantage of the AppleTV over a Mini? The mini is definitely more powerful, can use a remote with Front Row like the AppleTV, and can play DVDs to boot. Sure it's $200 more, but you get a LOT more functionality off of it.

What connections does your monitor have? If it has HDMI or component inputs you should be able to get a switcher for it for maybe $50.

My husband's the techie in the family, so I couldn't tell you why this would happen but it did. We download all of our content to our G5 located in our home office and would stream it over our wireless network. When doing this with the Mini, it would not stream. We'd have to move the content over to the Mini (time consuming) in order to view it properly and then delete it when done since the 80 gig hard drive would fill up quickly. With the iTV, there is no need for us to do this and the picture quality is better. We like to have a large library of content and ended up getting an external hard drive to connect to the Mini. Our entertainment center started to get really cluttered. Now it's much prettier with just the iTV.

We didn't really use Front Row. Sure, it was pretty, but it didn't make things easier with our set-up.

I'm not sure what connections our monitor has. It's the 30" Dell...I'll tell my hubby to look into it.

From the husband:
We have a component dvd player and the monitor only has one HDMI in the only switch that will accept component and HDMI and output to HDMI or DVI is at minimum $250.

If you know where we can find a switch that is less than $250, do tell!

He also got on me for calling it iTV. I have no idea where I picked that up from.