[media]

[Steeda_]

Good afternoon, I have a couple of questions if anyone could help-

1) I have quite a few older, non-Blu-Ray DVD's hanging around taking up a good chunk of space. What are my options to save some space? Could I burn them onto 1 big hard drive and somehow connect that to my Home Theater via an HDMI cable to watch them?

2) Does anyone have any experience with Apple TV? Are the Movies and shows you can purchase on par with Blu-Ray quality? If I have 2 TVs, would I then need to purchase a seperate Apple TV for each one, and in that case would my purchases be available on both units? Or would have to make the same purchase on each Apple TV to watch it in either room?

Thanks for any help, and sorry if the questions are vague.

[Longview]

1) Buy something like this or this and throw the DVD-cases away, saving only the discs. You could rip them to a HDD if you wanted to, but throwing away the source is generally not a good idea from a legal standpoint (not that anyone would care about a few movies unless you're distributing them to a ton of people), and the HDD might crash.

2) Ultimately Apple TV is of inferior quality than Blu-Ray, but the difference isn't that big unless you are really picky about resolutions. The movies are tied to your iTunes-account, just like the music you can purchase there. It would thus be available on both units.

[Steeda_]

Dam I was hoping that Apple TV would have been better quality. Is there anything like Apple TV, Roku, Netflix etc that can provide blu-ray quality media?

[Fuzzzie]

Dam I was hoping that Apple TV would have been better quality. Is there anything like Apple TV, Roku, Netflix etc that can provide blu-ray quality media?

There are a number of devices coming out lately that are basically android set top boxes. They can playback any form of media to your TV. I bought one that was on sale about 5 months ago and it was crap though. It was too slow to process HD streams.

Because a lot of the technology is proprietary, it's hard to find one box that will do everything you want it to do. Your best bet really is to set up a PC that hooks in to your television. That's the route I'm going at least.

[vesseblah]

Dam I was hoping that Apple TV would have been better quality. Is there anything like Apple TV, Roku, Netflix etc that can provide blu-ray quality media?

No. The thing is that BluRay movies are usually compressed at 25mbps quality (1080p in youtube is only 4.5mbps), and very few people have fast enough internet to reliably deliver it. Also the cost of doing business for streaming services would skyrocket.

As far as I know all streaming services offers quality similar to 720p rips you might find from pirate sites, at least both Netflix and HBO does in EU.