Hello everyone. Occasional lurker/first time poster here. I posted this question over at the Apple Discussion forum, but I'm betting the answers I get over here will be more helpful.

I have a five year old iMac G4 Flat Panel (125 GHz/2G RAM) that I've recently retired and replaced, due to a dead monitor. Since an iMac with a dead monitor is more or less worthless on eBay, I've been trying to come up with an alternate use for it. One possibility that I'm trying to assess is that of re-purposing it as a defacto Apple TV. I'm thinking that if I…

1. Disconnect the monitor
2. Set it up so Front Row automatically launches on startup
3. Equip it with a Mira Remote (twistedmelon.com/mira/) and an airport card

…I should be able to access the iTunes libraries on my Mac Pro and Windows laptop, then output it to my TV with little difficulty. I can do that, right?

So I have two questions that I need help with:

1. Can anyone recommend a reputable vendor that sells an airport extreme card for the iMac Flat Panel? And what is the approximate difficulty level in setting this up?
2. Are there any holes in this plan that I'm not seeing?

Well, the first one I can think of is that you'll only be able to output in Composite or S-Video. The quality will be a bit lower, but if you're not against it, it'll be fine. Maybe a nice case mod will be cool. I was thinking if you sawed off the top half of the case and replaced it with an acrylic window it would look sweet.

Those older airport extreme cards sell for a nice price these days, hard to come by. I would honestly check ebay first, you'll get the best deal on them there. Other vendors sell them pretty high.

As flippy was saying, you are going to be limited to the connectivity with your source. Although, I do recall someone saying the monitor output on the board was a mini dvi standard. So, there may be an adapter you can purchase for this and connect up an external DVI source!

http://www.macmod.com/forums/viewtopic.p...;amp;view=print

Best of luck and welcome to MacMod!

If it is indeed a mini-dvi variant, you could use this...

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/We...rnMore=M9321G/B

I don't know what it looks like, as I have not seen the internals. My guess is you will have to strip this and figure out the pin-out for it. But, if its the mini-dvi, it should be documented.

problem:

Great idea turning a imac into a apple tv using the apple tv hack installation..

Issue's

doesn't the imac not turn on the external video port until inside mac os x..