New Apple TV and wireless hard drive set up

[Rustysmart]

I've been interested in getting Apple TV for a while and now a new one has been announced it has reignited my interest again.

My issue is my MacBook is relatively low on hard drive space and to have a decent number of films etc I was thinking of getting a wireless hard drive.

I've read a couple of forum posts saying that storing iTunes on an external hard drive will result in slow down on the apple tv but now the new model is streaming based will it now receive data from an external hard drive quicker?

 

[OllyW]

I've read a couple of forum posts saying that storing iTunes on an external hard drive will result in slow down on the apple tv but now the new model is streaming based will it now receive data from an external hard drive quicker?

I think you'll have to wait until the new Apple TV is released before someone can give you an answer.

 

[ovrlrd]

Nobody really knows how much of an improvement the network streaming performance will be with the new Apple TV.

The speed/responsiveness of the computer it is connecting to could slow it down and make it unresponsive. Having your iTunes on a wireless drive definitely slows down the performance of iTunes and can cause similar issues.

No real way to tell if ther new Apple TV will be better in those situations but I can definitely say it is always best to use wired connections, especially with storage devices. There is an unavoidable amount of latency involved with wireless, which translates over to every read/write to the device. This then translates into delay in performing actions that use the device.

That said, iTunes uses a database to speed up the loading/searching for the data, but that does not solve any issues when it goes to read the actual data. And the initial load time of the database is also impacted.

 

[Rustysmart]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll hold off for a bit until more is known. Maybe a wired hard drive is the way to go forward.

 

[ayzee]

I'm planning on using multiple atv's to stream my iTunes library around my house. Since the atv doesn't have a hard drive, the streaming has to be s*** hot or else apple have a real fail whale here.

I'm just hoping that the arc has now problem streaming 720p content whatever the bitrate

 

[Corruptitudes]

Just setup a network, plug up a hard drive to said network via usb and say an airport extreme or time capsule, and point your itunes library on your macbook to that hard drive on the network. Thats how I have my library setup where all content is on the network drives, and then it is all "streamed" to the ATV.

Works beautifully....

 

[MacBoobsPro]

Just setup a network, plug up a hard drive to said network via usb and say an airport extreme or time capsule, and point your itunes library on your macbook to that hard drive on the network. Thats how I have my library setup where all content is on the network drives, and then it is all "streamed" to the ATV.

Works beautifully....

Doesnt the file get streamed twice over the network this way? I had mine on my TimeCapsule and every so often it would become incredibly slow and I'd get "Video format not recognised" messages.