who needs an apple tv? not us.
we have a mac in our “home office”, which is in fact a shallow closet. elsewhere in the apartment, we have a wii, and we have the wii hooked up to the hdtv, and we have the wii hooked up to the home theater. and the mac and the wii are on the same network.
enter wii transfer.
for a $19 shareware fee, which i paid and so should you when you use shareware, this little program feeds music, movies, photos, and browser bookmarks from your mac to the wii’s internet browser. so if i want to listen to itunes music through the stereo, or watch a downloaded video file on the hdtv, or watch a slideshow of my iphoto pictures, i can now just fire up the wii, use the wii’s browser to pull up the content, and bob’s your uncle, as they say in paraguay. it installed easily with practically no configuration, and worked perfectly out of the box.
there are a couple of minor drawbacks. you can’t play purchased drm-encoded video, so all my wonder showzen episodes bought in itunes stay on the mac. and audio files don’t stream yet (they are copied over to the wii on the fly), so you run into wii memory issues with large audio files. no radioshift yet.
but those are very minor quibbles. quibbles i can put up with when spending $19 for wii transfer, as opposed to $299 or even $399 for an apple tv. we listened to itunes playlists all weekend.
great stuff.