question about the new apple tv

I am between the new apple tv and the boxee box. I have netflix, and use it a fair amount, but my biggest use for a media player will be streaming videos I have downloaded online (yes mostly torrents), of which are avi files.

since apple tv has no usb, my setup would be an external hd attached to an airport extreme. Would the apple tv be able to read them off of the network? Would it be able to read avi files ( i have read it only will play mpeg4 files, in which case converting some many files would be a hassle)

thanks to any and all advice

this is a great question, i was wondering the same thing my self. I have the Time Capsule, so i was wondering if i can do that from there.

Nope, AppleTV can only handle files that use the format supported by iTunes (i.e. MP4; h.264)

Kash said:

Nope, AppleTV can only handle files that use the format supported by iTunes (i.e. MP4; h.264)

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And that will be the deal breaker for me… when I hook an Apple product up to my Home Theater, it's going to have to be a Mac Mini for me… long live VLC!!

ps.. Hi Kash!

It will when you throw perian on it - I am mostly confident it'll happen.

yea its definitely a deal breaker for me. I want to be able to play any files i can play on my computer, on my tv. I have no doubt that it will be jailbroken and whatnot, but I dont understand why apple cant just give us multiple file playback. I would buy it, no problem, if it could do that simple task......perhaps one day

Same here, I have a 4TB video collection, I'm not about to convert all of them to h.264 just for an AppleTV. I'm getting myself a Dell Zino HD once it's updated to the faster specs that were announced last month and run XBMC.

Back to the original question, the Apple TV 2 cannot stream directly from NAS or a drive plugged into an airport extreme. You have to get your content loaded into iTunes which means no AVI support. To my knowledge there is no solution to displaying AVI on ATV2 without converting to mp4.