Media Center Setup Question

[Wicked1]

Is anyone currently running a Mini via WiFi through your house, and have AT1 and AT2 connected to it.

I am looking at making my Mini a Server and hosting all my music, photos, TV Shows, Movies and Music Videos to share with the entire house. I have 1 Apple TV 160GB and I was thinking of getting 3 more ATV2's for the rest of the house.

Question I have is anyone running this setup and how does it work, also looking for some really good Air Play Speakers to run throughout the house.

 

[reebzor]

If you are hosting everything on the mini and plan on streaming to multiple devices, I would advise against the mini being on WiFi. Gigabit ethernet provides more than 3x the bandwidth of 802.11n at its fastest. You will definitely benefit from the mini being wired.

That being said, I stream from a server that is connected over gigabit ethernet to a mini thats on ethernet and a macbook pro the is WiFi and I rarely experience any lag even on 1080p videos over wifi. Bottom line- If you can plug the mini in, do it. If not, try it out over wifi and see if its a problem for you.

 

[d21mike]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

My mini is wired into the router. I have 3 atv2. 1 is on wifi the other 2 are wired. No problems. However, I nomally do not use them at the same time.

 

[mstrze]

I have my Mini stream my iTunes library to my AppleTV as well as my wife's MacBook via wifi and have had no issues. My iTunes library even resides on an external, attached to the Mini via USB 2.0.

Since the streaming for AppleTV is not true streaming in the internet sense of the word (viewing imagery at it arrives with maybe a tiny buffer), rather a transfer of the file to be played over to the internal memory/HDD of the ATV unit, I doubt that even with 3 ATVs wanting data at the same time, that there will be much of a problem...maybe a slower start to the movies, if all 3 request different videos at the same time as each ATV loads enough of the file to guarantee playback. Even then, it's probably not going to be noticeable.

I do agree that hardwiring it will guarantee no problems, but I imagine that with a good, solid wifi signal you should have very few problems with this setup.