Apple TV Vs. HDMI Port for MacBook

Have a ton of video on the macbook pro that I use VLC to watch on the actual laptop. Want to watch these on the HDTV and I am torn between getting Apple TV or the HDMI adapter for the Macbook Pro. I see this app called Airflick that I could stream from the laptop to the TV via the Apple TV device, would I need to convert anything with this? Most vids are .avi with a few .mkv.

Anyone have feed back on what my best bet is? Thanks in advance...

RidgeDallas said:

Have a ton of video on the macbook pro that I use VLC to watch on the actual laptop. Want to watch these on the HDTV and I am torn between getting Apple TV or the HDMI adapter for the Macbook Pro. I see this app called Airflick that I could stream from the laptop to the TV via the Apple TV device, would I need to convert anything with this? Most vids are .avi with a few .mkv.

Anyone have feed back on what my best bet is? Thanks in advance...

Click to expand...

Anything playing to the AppleTV 2 that is not in a compatible .mpeg4 or .mov container will have to be transcoded to a compatible format as they are playing. If these are large files, this may not go very smoothly. You could just convert your entire library using Handbrake. In the case of mkv files, if the video stream is h.264 and the audio is AC3, then you can simply remux them into m4v files with no loss in quality. MKVTools excels at doing this in batches.

Edit: I'm reading up on AirFlick and I *may* be wrong about the software needing to transcode to ATV-compatible formats. That is true for official apps, but AirFlick may be working around that. I'll try to test that out here this weekend.

Ok, I just re-ripped one of my movies into an MKV container with DTS sound, and my initial statement was correct. Using AirFlick, you cannot simply stream non-compatible files to the ATV. The app will offer to transcode them for you using another app (VLC), but it takes time and may not even work very well.

Bottom line: unless you want to jailbreak the Apple TV to add an app that will play anything you have now, you should plan to convert your library to a compatible format. Or connect your MacBook directly to the TV instead.