Streaming to AppleTV 2 without MAC?

Question

Truthfully I would of been more happry with the original AppleTV having the capability to handle an external hard drive. I would like to hook a a 4TB external drive to it load it with movies and music. Since this is not possible and the Apple TV 2 seems to be for streaminbg only my choices are to get a dedicated media player like Dune or maybe set up a server for streaming to the Apple TV. I really don't want to have my MAC on every time I want to stream but if a cheap server can hold my external drive and stream it then maybe a few apple tv 2 around the house would not be bad.
Has anybody set up a server to stream to your Apple TV?

Answer 1

abernardi wrote:
OK, I just got off the phone with an Apple rep and he tells me that the new AppleTV will indeed be able to stream media directly from a server. It won't need a computer to access your media. I'm still a little skeptical about that, because I'm not 100% sure he understood what I was asking. But he seemed to.
I'd be highly sceptical - I honestly doubt the reps know much at all about the unit as it hasn't even shipped, so they probably haven't been briefed on it.
I'd say there's a very good chance the new AppleTV will be able to access SMB, AFP or NFS shares. However, I don't think there will be any kind of elegant interface for that.
It would be a welcome option, but I doubt we'll see it.
It will just access your file or Video_TS folder and play the media. The Apple rep also said that it will play any video codec you throw at it, which is a pretty big claim.
I really don't believe that for one second, though I'd be overjoyed to be wrong on this.
He said there's still restrictions for photos and music. For music, it will play anything an ipod will play, which means still no support for FLAC, and for photos, only jpg, gif and Tiff.
I just built a HTPC on a windows 7 platform using XBMC as the front end. It works, and the XBMC can scrape a ton of material to make the searching a real pleasure. But I'm still considering dumping it all for a clean and simple AppleTV if it will play the files directly from the server. It sure would be simpler.
I just wish Apple took comments like this on board - many average consumers buy NAS devices or have lots of video in non h264 format - AppleTV's codec limitations /iTunes dependencies have been key in many friends decisions to buy something else.