Using ATV as media player exclusively for years, now what?

Question

My G5 crashed more than a year ago. I was using my ATV and imac together flawlessly. Since the crash, I was unable to afford a new one, so I was using the ATV as my only link to the internet and purchased quite a bit of media from itunes. I finally have a computer again, albeit a PC but would like to get the purchases back to a itunes library on the computer. I am aware I cannot get the pictures and non-itunes music back, but can I get the music and videos I bought back on to a PC before the 1st gen ATV crashes too?
Im aware that I can search the itunes store for every song/album I've bought and act like Im purchasing it again, and it sometimes says, " youve already purchased this song, would you like to download it again?" and sometimes it says, " youve already purchased this song, would you like to purchase it again?"
Any ideas? I've spent too much $$$ on this media to purchase it again or walk away from it.

Answer 1

Some people have reported that setting up a new Computer to sync will not delete items that are purchased but have not transferred back to iTunes.
I have not been in this situation so cannot confirm, but one would hope that this is the case - clearly other material such as photos/non Tunes music will delete in preparation for a new sync library, as perhaps will any previously purchased content you had already transferred to he iMac.
You may want to contact iTunes Store support and ask them if it's safe to do this - if they say yes non-transferred material will not be deleted, then at least you have some bargaining power if things don't go as planned to potentially re-enable downloads from iTunes on the new computer (their discretion entirely though).
There are unsupported free and commercial hacks for AppleTV that may allow you to directly access the AppleTv hard drive content but they are not necessarily straightforward without some technical knowledge but might let you recover all content. If the other content such as photos is of value to you, you may want to consider this course, but no guarantees of success and we can't go into detail here.
Good luck.
I just mention this as when you set up a new sync connection it will erase stuff transferred from iTunes.