apple tv or front row...decisions, decisions...

How big of a TV were you thinking of? Because the 24" iMac would make an awesome all-in-one media centre/TV.

lol very true Demosthenes! but my idea was to try and have a work desk and a tv lounge area on the other side of the apartment lol so originally it was an apple tv idea, but I'm thinking it might be more economical if I can do it with an imac.

If you have the extra $$ to spare, get a Mac Mini. The reason I say this is that your dilemma seems to be 'Apple TV or Frontrow' - well, with Leopard they'll be pretty much the same thing. That is, Frontrow will inheirit the Apple TV interface in Leopard.

I am about 50/50 on my use of Front Row and 'manually clicking' on video files. Front Row is nice, but the current interface is a little slow and takes too many remote clicks to navigate (the Leopard/Apple TV update looks to fix much of this). Also, it's such a pain in the ass to deal with Apple's h.264/iTunes integration. At least with a Mac Mini I can manually install codecs to get around this... with the Apple TV you have to do some serious hacking.

So, the choice for me was clear - though a little more than twice the price, the Mac Mini provided far more functionality. This made the purchase worth it (in my mind).

yes, this was my thinking as well

would be though it is possible to run two monitors off a mac mini, ie one for my desktop and one for my tv? seems to be no problem for an imac but I'm not so sure about a macmini

I don't think so, as the Mini only runs GMA 950 video. _Maybe_ with the Matrox DualHead2Go, but even then you'll be limited to VGA output (not DVI) and I don't think the display will be independent.

well now I'm entertaining the 17" c2d 2.0 imacs from staples at 867$...only worried I might find the screen too small, but then again, that is a fantastic price...