Looking for economical way to serve movies to AppleTV

Hi there. Newbie to the forums. I hope I'm posting in the right spot.

My question is, what's the best and most economical way to serve movies and video to stream to Apple TV?

I've been putting video on my iMac and just retrieving it using home sharing on my AppleTV but I noticed I'm running low on space.

Here's my setup (of what I think is the relevant hardware for this).

I have a mid 2011 iMac with a 500GB HD (where I'm bringing the movies in by); AppleTV 3rd Gen; 2012 Airport Express Base Station with 1 free LAN port; Gigabit 4 port switch and an external 1 TB hard drive.

Now, I'm using the external HD as a time machine backup so I don't want to use that. I'm either weighing between getting an old Mac Mini to act as a media server, or I'd really love a WiFi SSD External HD, but I think that's going to be way too expensive, and I'm not paying for a time capsule, especially considering I already have an Airport Express.

If I go the Mac Mini route, what's the oldest I can get, and with that, oldest OSX version? Also, is it my understanding that most aren't dual HDs? Or do I just want to get another external HD of a TB or two and hook it up to my iMac? I really was dissappointed that the USB port on the back of the Airport Express is for printers only, but I think going Airport Extreme was overkill at this time.

Is serving off USB 2.0 a problem for movies to my apple TV? would ethernet (hard wire) from a Mac Mini go faster than USB 2.0?

Whatever route I go. I don't want to spend over a couple hundred dollars. So I was thinking an really old Mac Mini off eBay or an external hard drive and I'm assuming I can setup home sharing to point to that HD.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

You could just connect an external drive to your iMac, move your iTunes library onto that and continue as you are now.

mrplow said:

You could just connect an external drive to your iMac, move your iTunes library onto that and continue as you are now.

Click to expand...

+1 on this advice

I keep my media on an external HD connected to my Mac Mini

I am doing exactly what the 2 above are proposing.

MacMini w/ iTunes and a 4TB iTunes drive. It is always on and serving. I have an Apple TV on the other TVs in the house that can all pull effortlessly. It was light years faster to set up and use than the old Windows MediaCenter Server PC I had before.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I think though, I found a nice option. A NAS. WD and Seagate have ones around $150 and they have cloud support on them so if I'm away and I really want to access some of those files, I could. That may be the option I want to go with.

I am sharing a 3tb hard drive over my network and pointing all machines to the external drive attached to my airport express as my ITunes library works well. that way I have 1 library and 3 machines using the same library real cool.....