Yeah. Right. It's a nice idea, but in my years of experience with these things the only way you can be sure that a media server and extender will actually agree to work with each other is if you get them from the same vendor they're from the same generation of technology.

After far too much time fooling with these devices I finally settled on using iTunes for my media server and Apple TV for my TV connection. It's not ideal. Neither are DLNA compatible -- whatever that means. In addition, while the Apple TV is a good device -- and now with you can actually use it to display video from your new Mac, iPhone, or iPad -- iTunes is... annoying.

Still, while iTunes is slow and its library management has always been a pain, it does work well with Apple TV -- -- and that makes it more reliable than any of the other combinations I've tried. So, for my purposes, I'm going to be using iTunes as my server and the Apple TV as my target device in this tale. Don't worry, the steps are pretty much the same for whatever device you choose to use.

is a free open-source front-end to libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. Libavcodec, in turn is part of the project, a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. FFmpeg is a tool best used by video-professionals. Handbrake, which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, gives you access to some of FFmpeg's power but it's much more suited for use by people who just want to easily and quickly convert their videos into formats they can watch on their TVs.