I got an Apple TV over the weekend and love it! I had it hooked up to my Family Room TV (HDMI), secure wireless internet, my iTunes Library, NetFlix Streaming, YouTube, etc. in less than 30 minutes! So cool to be able to listen to all of my iTunes with the Family Room TV and speakers instead of my laptop! Watched The Walking Dead Season 1 on NetFlix Streaming on my Family Room TV instead of the iPad 2 or laptop. Cool to look at family pics on a bigger screen. Internet Radio is amazing - there is a channel for everything. So Cool for just $100.00.

Not sure how many people know about this little unit because all of the Apple talk is over the higher selling items. Just thought I would throw out there and share my experience.

Airplay is the best part. You can use an app like Handbrake to convert your DVD library to digital and add the video files to your iTunes library and then just stream everything. They're pretty awesome little devices, I may end up having to pick one up soon. They need to get support for Hulu added in though.

I hadn't heard of Handbrake before now, but it looks like it is the best software for ripping DVD's. It is also free. Here are a couple articles I found:

http://www.macworld.com/article/157590/ ... brake.html

http://handbrake.fr/

That macworld article is a good one. I tend to use the apple universal preset to keep the resolution and quality higher. If it's going on my phone i'll rip it on that preset to keep the file as small as possible.

I've used handbrake extensively. The learning curve is a bit steep, but once you figure it out it works really well. The best advice I can give is to do a lot of reading in the online documentation. If you have specific questions, post them up and I'll do what I can.

If any of you have a spare computer sitting around (even old hardware works fine), you can get a free program called Boxee that is awesome. It'll do the same stuff that the Apple TV does, but isn't tied to any specific platform and can do some really cool stuff like streaming shows off of network web sites.