Apple TV + Mini + iPads home multimedia center?

Hi all, thanks in advance for your feedback...Just wanted to run an idea by those of you AppleTV users.

1st off, I have macbook pros I use for work, and at home, my wife and I both have ipads. No home computer.

I was trying to figure out how to best set up a home multimedia system, as our itunes collection is on one of my work computers, and our family photos are on an external HD. My wife wants access to both of these things, so I want to try and set up a home multimedia system.

My thoughts for this:
1. Purchase Apple Mac Mini as a file server to store the large itunes library, and family photos and videos.
2. Share it to AppleTV.
3. Access those photos, videos and songs through Apple TV when in the family room.
4. Be able to access the photo, song and video library from the ipads wherever in the house (unsure on this part - Would this best happen through viewing appleTV via iPads(is that possible?), or would it be best accomplished by a Remote Desktop type app on the ipads that takes over that Apple Mac Mini?)
5. Be able to watch youtube videos from ipads on AppleTV.

From my research, it seems like this setup would be able to do this (with the question marks on #4) ...but is there anything I'm over looking or is there a way to be able to do this better? Would I need a particular router or other hardware?

Thanks so much.

Hi there,

I have pretty much this setup at home. I have a Mac Mini as my media server, with an external RAID storing all my media. My have ATVs on both the TVs in the house, and two Airports which allow me to stream audio to my sound systems. My wife and I both have MacBooks, iPads and Phones, all using Homesharing and AirPlay to talk to each other. It works extremely well.

I can control any of the ATVs from any iOS device, and either pull media from the ATVs or push media from the Mini. I use the Apple Remote app in most instances, and then have a third-party app called 'Screens' which allows me to fully control the Mini from my iPad (the iPad works as screen, mouse and keyboard for my Mini, so I can control it from anywhere in the house).

It all works brilliantly and is very cost effective when compared against dedicated systems like Sonos.

ETA: You can connect directly to your media library and view video or play music from there on your iPad, but I don't know about photos as I don't store these on my Mini. Haven't tried pulling multiple media files at the same time, either.

Thanks for the reply!

I ended up getting the mac mini and appleTV over the holidays and transfered our photo library, got a DVD ripper for our home videos and catalogued our photos. For music it has worked wonderfully.

The big thing I'm trying to figure out is showing photos in an organized manner. Even though I have all our family photos organized into many folders by date, ATV seems to pull all the photos across the itunes family share based on "modified date" which unfortunately for me is all of the same date, because I never set the date on my camera.

I'd much rather have the ability to click on a master folder within ATV (photos/videos) then select "New Years Day 2014" folder that I have set up. But instead it ignores the folders and brings over files only.

Does anyone have experience with making photos look more organized from computer to ATV?