AppleTV: Good Medium for Final-Cut-Studio-Generated HD Home Video?

Question

I've been shooting HD for several years, long before HDDVD or BluRay came out. I've been assuming that eventually a good HD medium, mostly just for home movies, will come out.
However, now that BluRay does exist, I'm not sure that it's the best viewing medium for home movies. BluRay drives and disks still seem to be pretty rare and expensive whereas hard disks are very cheap. That, plus my particular BluRay player won't play recorded BluRay disks anyway.
So it suddenly occurred to me: Should I just typically use Apple TV for my FCS-generated HD home movies?
Just speaking in generalities, what do you folks think are the positives and negatives of taking that approach?
Concerns that pop into mind might include: First, the 160GB hard-disk space. I'm guessing that might be 10-20 feature-length HD home-movie productions? Well, maybe that's fine... Second, does AppleTV have any provisions for typical DVD-menu features, like alternate soundtracks, subtitles, and especially, chapter selection menus?
Thanks for your thoughts!

Answer 1

I think the first point to appreciate is that the tv will only play up to 720p content, in reality though you'd likely end up creating 540p movies as at 720p the tv will only work at 24/25 fps. I suppose it all depends on what you think of this reduction in resolution versus convenience.
There is no doubt that 540p isn't 1080p but for many tv users the difference is not significant enough to outweigh the convenience. Personally I'm just glad to get my numerous home videos onto the tv in a way that the whole family can just click and watch without needing to connect various cables, understand difficult interfaces, look for missing/damaged disks etc etc.
I wouldn't worry about storage, my library is now on a 4 TB external drive attached to my mac, I stream all my content to the tv and don't see any need to put any of it on the tv itself. Of course this relies on the mac being available whenever we want to watch something via the tv.
The tv can play alternate sound tracks, subtitles and does include for chapter selection. Of these adding subtitles may be the area of most difficulty, alternate sound tracks and chapters should be quite simple given your background.
Of late the tv also supports additional features such as bonus tracks and the like that would often be found on a typical DVD, however this is a relatively new feature and to my knowledge there is no easy way of adding home made extras.
Yes the tv does run very hot, or at least appears to. In fact id only consumes around 20 W (48 W peak) and it's unique approach to heat dissipation through its casing often gives the wrong impression about heat.
Some people do have issues with the tv, but I think every device will produce issues for someone or another. Most issues seem to relate to network connectivity though which is generally an area outside the control of the tv.
I think for you the primary consideration may be the tv resolution, I have no issues with it, I do hope that one day they will update the tv with additional hardware specifications that will allow me to watch my 1080p home video, but for now I just export 2 versions and put the 1080p version away for the future, as no-one in our family is willing to stand around my computer monitor to gain a little extra quality, when they can sit together in the lounge and watch it in comfort.