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Movies through a shared library ?
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I have movies on my Buffalo NAS which is running a DNLA server.
I was hoping that I could share the library on the network for my son to view movies on his PC.
The drive shows as a shared library but only shows music files, you cannot see any of the movie files and i can't see any settings on the NAS or itunes which would affect the types of files displayed.
cheers phil
I was hoping that I could share the library on the network for my son to view movies on his PC.
The drive shows as a shared library but only shows music files, you cannot see any of the movie files and i can't see any settings on the NAS or itunes which would affect the types of files displayed.
cheers phil
Hallo, newbie on this forum. Sounds like you're asking whether you can view movies on iTunes/AppleTV.
I once asked Seagate, which owns Maxtor why my Maxtor Shared Storage device would not show video. They explained to me that this is not a limitation of the device, but of how Apple has implemented DLNA on iTunes. My suspicion is that this was one of several conditions of iTunes selling Hollywood's content, but I don't know for sure. I suspect that the PC would have a couple of very fine bits of client software for DLNA, but iTunes isn't one of them. The AppleTV won't even stream music from an NAS
If you weren't referring to using iTunes, then I'm not sure what might be going wrong. I think you can use a player like VLC to open a particular file location, and that could be elsewhere on the network, but it's a little less convenient than using iTunes. My apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick.
I once asked Seagate, which owns Maxtor why my Maxtor Shared Storage device would not show video. They explained to me that this is not a limitation of the device, but of how Apple has implemented DLNA on iTunes. My suspicion is that this was one of several conditions of iTunes selling Hollywood's content, but I don't know for sure. I suspect that the PC would have a couple of very fine bits of client software for DLNA, but iTunes isn't one of them. The AppleTV won't even stream music from an NAS
If you weren't referring to using iTunes, then I'm not sure what might be going wrong. I think you can use a player like VLC to open a particular file location, and that could be elsewhere on the network, but it's a little less convenient than using iTunes. My apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick.
Short and not very satisfying answer: You can't view movie files on a DNLA-running NAS device through iTunes.
It's very annoying if, like me, you dropped a couple of hundred on an NAS. But that's the way that Apple wants it.
From what I can tell, the preferred solution is to buy a very cheap PC with a great deal of memory, keep it on the whole time, and serve its content to an AppleTV or iTunes.
Or, and this might work, and I'm guessing you followed this thread at iLounge, you might be able to make your NAS the default music library for each computer's copy of iTunes in your house. As well as being a little tricksy, it also runs the risk of corrupting your iTunes library.
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=178787
Sorry to be so bleak.
It's very annoying if, like me, you dropped a couple of hundred on an NAS. But that's the way that Apple wants it.
From what I can tell, the preferred solution is to buy a very cheap PC with a great deal of memory, keep it on the whole time, and serve its content to an AppleTV or iTunes.
Or, and this might work, and I'm guessing you followed this thread at iLounge, you might be able to make your NAS the default music library for each computer's copy of iTunes in your house. As well as being a little tricksy, it also runs the risk of corrupting your iTunes library.
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=178787
Sorry to be so bleak.
Thanks for the info, I think I will just add the movies he want to view to his itunes library which are stored on the NAS.
I was hoping he would be able to view all the content but it seems not, unless i leave my MAC on all the time, in which case he can see all my content.
Seems a strange thing for apple to do...........
Thanks Phil
I was hoping he would be able to view all the content but it seems not, unless i leave my MAC on all the time, in which case he can see all my content.
Seems a strange thing for apple to do...........
Thanks Phil
There may be an alternative. I've been exploring Boxee the last few days. You can install it yer Mac or AppleTV (not PC, yet), and it seems to be fairly good at hunting down your network content as well as other stuff on the internet and presenting it for your viewing pleasure. It's very much in alpha right now, and I have no idea whether it works with an NAS, and I'm going to have to hack my AppleTV to get it to work, but it might do what you need.
I store all of my files on a NAS as well, but didn't want my main computer on all the time since it sucks through power like a 3 dollar whore. Anyway, I picked up a MSI wind PC from newegg. All you need is to add ram and a harddrive and for less than 200, you can have a small iTunes server. The great thing is even at 100% this thing only uses about 45 watts. I use VNC to control it when I need to, but it usually just sits there and streams all my content. I don't even have anything on the hardrive of my appleTV. Just a thought, but it's really worked well for me.
Greg
Greg