Home Media Server with AppleTV?

[secondcup]

Has anyone tried this?:

I bought a Buffalo Technology Linkstation Live network drive and transferred all my iTunes content onto it. I'm now successfully streaming music from the drive to AppleTV over my wireless network (essentially using ATV as an Airport Express).

The problem is, when I link my laptop (which runs iTunes) with ATV, iTunes now locks up, and I have to force quit to get out of it. Everything's great unless iTunes "mounts" the ATV as a device.

Has anyone else run into this problem or successfully set up a similar home media server with ATV?

Thanks for any help.

 

[omni]

I have a Buffalo 4TB station as well with all of my content on there as well.

I'm using a normal iMac which has my entire library but wireless through my home network although I don't have an apple router/time capsule for stupid HOA reasons (don't ask).

What version of AppleTV are you on? What version of iTunes are you on? Are you running N?

I haven't had any problems to be honest.

 

[Michael CM1]

Well, here's my setup that was working until a problem with an iMac:

Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11n)
iMac G5 w/Leopard
Apple TV 40GB
2 500GB Western Digital MyBook drives (the best darn ones out there)

I have TV shows and movies on one drive and moved the movies to the newer one once I got low on space. I kept the music libraries on the iMac and MacBook Pro. For what I want to use on the Apple TV, I add to the iTunes Libary on the iMac. iTunes has to stay open on that computer, but that's usually no problem. Everything seems to stream pretty well.

I did have a lot of problems using multiple MyBook drives before the latest firmware update to AEBS (I used 7.1.1 before 7.3.1 came out).

Hope some of that helps.

 

[secondcup]

Thanks for the feedback guys,

I wonder if I need to go to Leopard to make this work smoother. I'm on the latest versions of ATV and QT with an N network.

It seems like you guys are splitting you media between your computer and the external drives. I thought iTunes will only see a single library, or is there a way to change that?

 

[ayale99]

You can have separate libraries.
I believe that if you hold down 'option' when you drag a a new file to iTunes, it will create an alias for it and keep the file in its original location. Not completely sure of the procedure. Can someone else clarify?

Thanks for the feedback guys,

I wonder if I need to go to Leopard to make this work smoother. I'm on the latest versions of ATV and QT with an N network.

It seems like you guys are splitting you media between your computer and the external drives. I thought iTunes will only see a single library, or is there a way to change that?

 

[mallbritton]

You can have separate libraries.
I believe that if you hold down 'option' when you drag a a new file to iTunes, it will create an alias for it and keep the file in its original location. Not completely sure of the procedure. Can someone else clarify?

It's Apple+Option if you are dragging and dropping a file from a location and you don't want iTunes to copy it to it's default music folder location.

Regards,
Michael

 

[secondcup]

It's Apple+Option if you are dragging and dropping a file from a location and you don't want iTunes to copy it to it's default music folder location.

Regards,
Michael

Ahhhh...so simple! I was over-thinking it, thanks. Now I just need to figure out why my ATV and iTUnes won't play nice with the new Linkstation.

sc