iMac restart possible while simultaneously streaming to AppleTV

[NatefromRI]

Well, color ME impressed! I was streaming a movie from my iTunes library to my Apple TV (3rd Generation). I had been controlling AppleTV from my iPhone and connected to my movie library, which resides on an external hard drive connected to my iMac.

I had simultaneously been letting the Disk Utility verify my hard disk and decided after the utility completed to reboot my iMac. Knowing that I was streaming a movie to Apple TV, I expected the movie to cut out on me during the restart. However, I was a bit surprised to see that although the computer went through its restart, the movie continued to stream to Apple TV.

I tested again to be sure that what happened actually occurred and got the same results. What I believe to be the reason why this is working is because I activated the stream from my iPhone vs. from the computer itself. In fact, I just now shut down iTunes on my iMac as I'm typing this and the movie continues to play.

Either the movie has streamed enough of a buffer to continue to play without the need for iTunes to continue running, or there are other things at play which I have not yet figured out.

I am going to try to stream the movie directly from the iMac vs. controlling my collection from my iPhone and will report back my results in a follow-up post.

These are movies I have ripped from my own DVD collection using Handbrake. Not movies purchased from Apple.

--Nate

 

[NatefromRI]

OK...did a bit more testing. When directly playing a movie from the iMac to Apple TV, a reboot will disconnect the movie from streaming (as I expected). However, I have proven again that if you start a movie by controlling your iTunes movie collection from your iPhone (using REMOTE), as long as iTunes is running when the AppleTV first connects to your iTunes collection, you can start the movie and then go back to your computer and turn off iTunes and the movie will continue to run. Up until today I had thought that it was a requirement to keep iTunes running in the background under any circumstance to allow the movie to be streamed to Apple TV.

Once iTunes is shut down, you will not be able to go select (for example) ANOTHER movie, but the one you are watching seems to continue to run without the need for iTunes to be running...which is why it allowed me to reboot the computer and still allow the movie to play.

Anyway, I found this to be interesting. YMMV but I'm still pretty impressed.

I may try to start a movie by using my iPhone to tap into my iTunes movie collection, then completely shut down the computer for an extended period of time to see how long the movie continues to play. I have a feeling that the movie will stop playing before it ends but I may be wrong. We'll see later.

--Nate