[warrell]

First time poster long time stalker! Please be gentle with me!

I'm looking for some advice, I started out playing around with XBMC on my laptop discovered icefilms and flashsportstreams jailbroke my iPad and now run it on their and hook it up to the tv through the VGA cable which works fine but...

I now want a dedicated xbmc home theatre solution I've gone over lots of the builds and what Gr8rtek has done here looks most simple but I have a few questions.

1. What are the restrictions of using ATV2?

2. Gr8rtek said "I built this demo board to allow me to demonstrate XBMC in the customer's home, requiring only power and a HDMI connection."



How dose it connect to the internet?

Like I said bear with me I pretty technically capable once I know what I'm doing. But right now I have no idea as you can tell

[Chris!]

How dose it connect to the internet?

By Wi-fi?

I think this:

requiring only power and a HDMI connection

referred to actual physical cables

[Gr8rtek]

In this particular situation, this "demo" setup uses a static IP on the NAS and on the ATV2, connected only to a 100MBPS switch. This is only used to show a potential client how "easy" it is to setup an AppleTV2 with XBMC, and to demonstrate some of the capabilities available, like scraped movies and music, photo slide shows, etc.

While I think that Icefilms serves a nice purpose, I do not demonstrate it on the systems I build for clients so as to avoid the perception of advocating piracy. I do, however, mention to clients that XBMC is open-source software, freely available, with a strong development community that has authored a wide variety of useful add-ons and extensions for XBMC. I also make mention of the great add-ons that BlueCop has authored for Hulu, ESPN3 and Amazon, and several customers have enjoyed using these plugins.

Now, to fully answer your questions "How does it connect to the internet?", you can plug a CAT5e cable into one of the open ports on the D-Link switch and viola! Instant internetz ... unless you have an IP conflict

[warrell]

Thanks Gr8rtek after googling lots of what you said I'm now understanding better! In your opinion what would be the best way for me to start out with my first setup.

I would like to be able to to start building my media library electronically as it is currently all on DVD's or Blurays and play these through XBMC and ATV2 with a view to have more than one ATV in different rooms accessing the same content. Streaming through plugins is also a feature I would want so Internet connection is a must aswell.

What would I need and how would it work to set up from scratch thanks to you all for your patience

[warrell]

Updated*

[Gr8rtek]

In my current iteration, I have a custom install of XBMC with Spotify running on Windows 7. This works well for me because I am a Windows guy. I am running on a JetWay PC I picked up from Newegg for $300. It came with HDD and Win7 pre installed only needing RAM (2GB). This is connected to my gigabit LAN via Cat6, where it accesses my Drobo with (currently) 4TB of storage for approx. 175 DVDs and BluRays, as well as the complete collection of Seinfeld and M.A.S.H. And Archer Season 1 and 2. All of the Movies and TV shows are native resolution rips using MakeMKV. Both regular DVDs and BluRays play back extremely smoothly on the XBMC front-end PC without any issue. I had trouble with 1080p playback on an ATV2 on our patio, so I converted our 1080p files to 720p using Handbrake with settings optimized for the ATV2. It was cumbersome, but less trouble than effective troubleshooting

Because I'm anal-retentive and OCD, I placed my DVDs in a folder named "movies-480", then HD movies in a folder named "movies-1080" for the Win7 PC and "movies-720" for the ATV2. When the multiple movies sources are added and scraped, it appears they are all in a "single" folder anyway.

Next, I added my music library from the NAS. Once I added the source, I highlighted the source, brought up the context menu, and selected scan item to library. After that was complete, I brought up the View Options menu and enabled library mode. Finally, I returned to the main screen, selected music, then arrow downtown artists. From here, bring up the context menu again, and select query info for all artists (not sure if it is necessary, but I did the same thing for albums). This got all of the artist and album information loaded for all of my music.

Now for the hard part...data verification. I went through all of my movies, television shows and music, validating the information retrieved from the scrapers. Some people use NFO files and third-party media managers to help with this process, but I have borked my library on at least two previous occasions with third party tools, and that is why, for now, I use the tools available within XBMC.

I also use add-ons from BlueCop's repository for Hulu, Amazon, ESPN3 and Free Cable,and these work well on both the PC and the ATV2. I use IceFilms, on occasion, to "try-before-I-buy" on new release titles, but I end up buying the movies I like because I enjoy the higher resolution and Multi-channel audio I get with DVDs and BluRays on my system.

I don't know if I answered your question at all, or even if I came close. Itrust if you have additional questions, you will respond. Back to drinking