Degrade in quality external HD via USB 2.0?

[understando]

Ok, So I am looking for a HTPC type solution and with the jailbreak to ATV2 I think that might be a decent solution at least for a while while I slowly piece together a htpc to my liking. ( They are much more expensive than I imagined)

So here are a few questions I have... they might be basic but I have searched some and haven't come up with an answer.

I have a tb external with tons of media on it. It is unfortunately not a NAS... (maybe I just need to get one, although that makes my investment 200 bucks... and I am trying to do this as cheaply as possible) so I guess I would have to technically keep it connected to a cpu via usb and then connect with ATV to stream from there. Right?

Also, I have read that usb 2.0 will bottleneck and degrade quality from HD. So, I would assume that would happen in streaming it to ATV as well. Is that true?

So, if anyone knows or has experience with the best way to connect to that it would be great. (I have a macbook pro and a old toshiba laptop that I can use to keep the hd powered & stream from.)

Thanks!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

USB 2.0 will be sufficient for compressed HD movies, which you most likely have, as the usually have a data rate of less than 2MB/s. USB 2.0 can deliver up to 35MB/s, therefore there is enough room for compressed HD content to be played/streamed from a USB HDD.

 

[understando]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Cool. (thanks for the quick reply)

I do have alot of bluray rips and 1080p rips. Will it work alright as well or should I expect some stuttering there?

(edit for auto text correction)

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Cool. (thanks for the quick reply)

I do have ally of bluray rips and 1080p rips. Will it work alright as well or should I expect some stuttering there?

It will work, unless the Mac you use is not up to it, due to its CPU, but even my 2007 iMac with 2GHz can play 1080p .mkv files.

For example, if you would encounter stutter due to the data rate of the 1080p video, it would be because the file would have a data rate of higher than 30MB/s, which would mean, that a two hour movie would be 210GB big. Normally rips are below 20GB or even 10GB, which means a data rate of 2.8MB/s and 1.4MB/s for a two hour movie. (20*1024/7200). I doubt you have movies with such a high data rate though.