Apple TV...streaming is 'hitchy'! What gives?

[HollywoodHills]

Okay, so for the past two days, I have been setting up my new home with what I thought would be a bad arse wireless network. Here is my set up, and then I will explain what is going on:
1 PC running Vista SP1
1 Hewlett Packard laptop running Vista SP1
1 MacBook Pro OS X 10.5.6
2 iphones
Apple TV

All of this is accessing my AEBS, which is connected to a Seagate FreeAgent 1.5TB formatted for HSF+

Now, I have a total of 112 gigs of TV, Movies and music on my Macbook Pro which I have shared over the network. However, I also moved my entire library onto the Seagate FreeAgent so I could free up the space on MacBook. In doing so, I also thought that I could save money and only get the 40gig Apple TV so I could not use the space on ATV and simply stream my media content via my shared itunes library stored on the Seagate. Well, I'm not getting the results I wanted. My ATV is actually hardwired into the AEBS, and is literally a foot and a half away from the Seagate, and it is taking nearly 10 minutes to load one 42 minute episode of LOST, and when I begin playing it, it briefly pauses every 5 seconds or so. This is very disappointing to say the least, and I am at a loss on what I can do. I can't believe you cannot simply hardwire an external HD to the Apple TV, and access content that way! (Although I have read about ATV hacks that can enable this, but I like to play it safe). My question is this: Has anyone on these forums experienced what I am, and is there any fix? Thanks in advance.

 

[Aegelward]

Your other devices might be slowing down the network, try shutting off anything unessasary and see if your performance increases, if you really think it's that bad you might have to consider upgrading to the latest Airport Extreme which supports dual mode networks.

 

[belvdr]

All wireless is half duplex, meaning only one device can transmit or receive at any instant. So if other devices are hitting the wireless, it is likely it can cause hiccups in the streaming.

 

[agwilson]

Reading over your description, you have the MacBook Pro as the device that has the active iTunes library that does all the syncing from. Have you tried connecting this to the ethernet port of the AEBS?

I'm not sure exactly how iTunes works with content when streaming, but from what I can tell the system is probably having the data go from the external HD to the MacBook Pro and then back out to the Apple TV. As you can guess if you are doing this over wireless that creates a massive slowdown since you are broadcasting over wireless twice. If having the MacBook Pro connected to ethernet improves the situation then you might consider moving your library to a computer that is connected to the AEBS by ethernet and on all the time or at least when you wish to use the Apple TV.