ATV with iCloud for homevideo's?

[leontebbens]

Please some advice on home video storage and viewing (with Apple TV).

My wife and I are currently burning home video's (30 mins, Sony HD cam, Final Cut Pro X) to blu ray's. Our Blu Ray player is broken and Blu Ray burning gets more and more complicated, so we are looking for alternatives. We love and have many Apple products, but no Apple TV yet.

Would it be possible to store our home video's (2 per year each 10-15 GB, 30 mins) in iCloud and view them with Apple TV? I am really looking for an all (i)Cloud solution here, future proof, without the need for a NAS or streaming from our MacBooks. Anyone using homevideo's like this?

Thanx,
Danielle & Leon

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Buy a big fat hard drive for dirt cheap + unretire or buy any old Windows or Mac computer capable of running iTunes (if you check around, somebody will probably give you one stashed in a drawer somewhere if you don't have one). Store all of your present & future movies on that hard drive and let that computer be your "server" so that your MBs are always free to be turned off or go mobile.

Trusting the cloud- even iCloud- is trusting strangers to take care of your media. In this case, it's your private- probably precious- home movies. Why hope that strangers will be good caretakers when you know that you will care for your own property so much more than they will? If anything, use the cloud as a secondary backup. If the house burns down and your own internal "cloud" burns with it, you'll be able to recover your home moves from secondary storage. However, even there, what I would do is buy a second big fat hard drive and regularly sync the one at home up with it. Store the second one somewhere else (family, friend, bank safe deposit box). Then you have 100% control of your home media and your primary backup.

There are private channel options on Vimeo and Youtube. Basically, you can upload your videos there and they are not visible to the general public- just you & your wife. That's storing them in robust "clouds." Play them back just like any other Youtube or Vimeo video.

Others are likely to chime in suggesting other apps, 1+ of which can probably do what you seek. So if you are mentally committed to doing it that way, just watch for someone else to chime in with a solution.

 

[Surf Boy from Barcelona]

Yes! You can store them in the Apple iCloud. Keep them in your Photos app on your MacBook and upload them to the iCloud. Apple will charge you 1Euro a month for using over 5G of storage though. Apple market their iCloud as their main connection to their everything, so I really do not think that it's going to go away any time soon.
Just keep your main master copy on your MacBook. That said, Apple Home Sharing with your MacBook is so simple that you may even just stream from that. (BTW, I got rid of discs way back in 2010 and never went the blu-ray route - best decision I ever made - just like CDs for me, they are last century ;')

 

[leontebbens]

Yes! You can store them in the Apple iCloud. Keep them in your Photos app on your MacBook and upload them to the iCloud. Apple will charge you 1Euro a month for using over 5G of storage though. Apple market their iCloud as their main connection to their everything, so I really do not think that it's going to go away any time soon.
Just keep your main master copy on your MacBook. That said, Apple Home Sharing with your MacBook is so simple that you may even just stream from that. (BTW, I got rid of discs way back in 2010 and never went the blu-ray route - best decision I ever made - just like CDs for me, they are last century ;')

Thanx. Agree, we want to be disk-free. But... I read somewhere about a limit of 15 minutes for a video in Photos. Did you encounter this (or other) limits?

 

[Boyd01]

I use an Apple TV with a Mac Mini connected to a 4tb disk as an iTunes server, works great. I have about 1.5tb of movies ripped from my large DVD collection in addition to a few of my own. I like having local copies of all my media.

But you might want to look at Vimeo as @HobeSoundDarryl suggested, I've been very pleased with them myself. I have the "plus" plan that cost $60/year and allows uploading 5gb per week. https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/art...gest=5b71b68f3e33b9883f61491a6592bf37d0a41276

The 5gb limit is less than your 10-15gb videos so you'd have to break them into parts. However, those files sound big for 30 minutes of 1080p video. I also use Final Cut Pro X and Compressor, but I find that Handbrake does a good job and the "SuperHQ" settings produce very nice results. In a recent test, Handbrake made a file 50% the size of Apple Compressor and I couldn't tell any quality difference. It's a free program, so it's worth a try - you can probably get them down to 5gb.

There are a lot of advantages to Vimeo, makes it easy to share with friends or embed on websites. And it's easy to make it private, as Darryl said. You can create a private link to a video and send it to anyone to watch, even if they aren't a Vimeo member for example.

 

[BJMRamage]

I ram into this issue earlier. I wa Ted to store some movies I make (twice a year, about 30minutes each with music from iTunes in the background).

I was thinking I could use iCloud and the iMovie Theater as a nice and easy way to save these to the cloud and not worry about a computer in the house or on. But that has a 15min max. Using Photos would be fine as it goes around that 15min Max.

Somebody suggested YouTube and making private or unlisted. That works. I have my movies in a non-public area. BUT. Two movies have Beatles songs playing and as such are banned worldwide. I was hoping to send a link to relatives, so they could easily watch them too. I can still watch these movies since they are under my account. But they are flagged. Not sure if I add more if that'll mean my YouTube account will be closed or shutdown.

There's PLEX but then you either need a cloud-based account or a computer running as a server (I think). Good luck with this. I'm still trying to find a method to have my videos available…anywhere/anytime/to anyone I choose.

 

[Boyd01]

I have my movies in a non-public area. BUT. Two movies have Beatles songs playing and as such are banned worldwide.

I haven't had a problem like this, but others say that as long as you keep them private, Vimeo will not do anything to them. You could setup a free account and give it a try. I think you need a "plus" account to set private links to people, but you can share them privately with other Vimeo members.