I am new to the htpc but I have been in using mac's since the IIci. I currently have 3 tower's and two laptops. I am not yet sure how I am going to hook up my home theater to one of my mac's, but I have purchased several 1TB drives and a quad bay external SATA enclosure. I have started burning off off my dvd's using MacTheRipper. I thought I would be able to get all of my dvd's onto one drive, but it looks like that isn't going to happen. I am not sure what program I will use to catalog or playback my movies and music. All of my music is ripped from cd's and I don't have any music from itunes. On my 8 Core Mac Pro I am running Leopard, so I have FrontRow but I don't have a remote. If I use frontrow or something like that, do you have to have all of your movies in one place?

Front Row would require the videos to be in the Movies folder

you can do this from an external by having an Alias in the movies folder pointing to the external drive (repeat for each external)


or you can do what a few of us have done using Dvdpedia as the front end instead of front row and use the link feature to link it to each Video_ts folder ....here is the link to a post about it (with a demo) http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=781221

The cool thing about dvdpedia is you can also link it to avi/mkv and other vid types. If you install VLC it will launch and play them as well
good luck

*Edit oh and...My 1st post =p