[oOWallaceOo]

Hey,

Firstly I would like to say congratulations to the team that put this port of XBMC together. I knew it would happen at some stage but didn't think it would happen so soon. Great work.

I have been running XBMC on my laptop for the past year with all my Movie/TV Show data on a WD My Passport Hard Drive. This has worked well, but when I want to watch a film with a group of people screen size and the speakers stop it from being an enjoyable experience.

I think I am ready to upgrade to something better, but being a student my income and living situation changes too often to really make building a HTPC and NAS a viable solution.

But with XBMC now on ATV2 I am thinking about it again. My idea is to purchase an ATV2 and an Airport Express. I am not 100% sure, but my understanding is that this would allow me to connect my WD HDD to the Airport Express which would then allow me to wirelessly stream my files to the ATV2.

I am not that knowlegdable about Apple products so I was hoping someone here could give me input as to whether this could work before I spend the next months drinking money on it.

[neomits]

Should work. I've used this setup with ATV1. My only caution (and something that caused me to pursue a NAS instead of Airport Extreme Base Station) is that the USB throughput on the AE is limited. I found that any movie encoded at higher than 6000 kbps would stutter due to the lack of bandwidth on the USB input. Most 720p x264 encodes fell below this, but you run across high bitrate encodes every so often.

[oOWallaceOo]

Thanks for the input, I think I'll go this route then. All my files are SD so I am pretty sure it shouldn't be a problem. Time to start looking for cheap prices.

[johnsea]

Just a quick not that it's actually the Airport Extreme that shares hard drives, the Airport Express only shares printers. I can pull 15megaBytes a second from an AE connected drive, so that won't be the limiting factor in HD video viewing. I am however having issues with the ATV2 and HD videos in general though, stuttering and stuff (even when shared from my ethernet connected laptop)