First excuse me, english is not my primary language.
So, for now, i watch all my movies and TV shows with a MacBook Pro hooked up to my TV with an HDMI cable. It works, but it’s a little annoying. I had a look to all thoses media center boxes, but the Apple TV has all those things like Airplay and mirroring but a really poor compatiblity with various media types. And then i heard about atv flash.
If i buy an Apple TV, everyone in house is gonna use it. My wife, my kids, me, everyone! So i need something really simple to use. So i don’t plan to use solutions like XBMC or Plex. If i understood things correctly, atv flash come with a built in media player right inside the home screen, right?
My biggest concern is about performance. I have a lot of 1080p movies with sometimes really high bitrate, some movies are really big, like 15gb. So i want to know what are the performances of the media player with this kind of huge files? If this can help, most of them are MKV with H264 for the video and AC3 or DTS for the audio track.
Apple TV2 currently only supports 720p so attempting to play a 1080p video of that size will have severe side effects and isn’t recommended. The Apple TV3 supports 1080p but cannot be jailbroken yet and therefore aTV Flash is a useless option.
I play 1080p files without problems on my ATV2 - but they are probably encoded at a lower bit rate than the ones you are talking about. Mine are typically under 10GB for a movie. I also use a wired connection rather than WiFi which again is likely to become a factor as bit rates get higher.
I would expect that when it has been jailbroken then the new ATV3 is likely to be a better at this. As well as being able to output 1080p natively which will avoid the transcoding requirement it also has more RAM and a faster processor compared to the ATV2.