I am in the planning stages of my mini media center and I need some advice on a few decisions I need to make before beginning. In my office, I have a 24 inch Imac WIRED to a Airport Extreme and a 1TB external hard drive for photos,music, and future movies. Downstairs, I have my home theater setup. It consists of a 42inch plasma, 5.1 stereo, and blu ray. My plans are to purchase a new mini, put it in the home theater room and connect it Wirelessly to surf the web, use netflix, youtube, and que movies, photos, using PLEX and external HD's. How does the mini perform when using a wireless connection for internet? Can the mini (using plex) access the external HD in my office wirelessly? Thanks for your time and sorry the "long version" of this mumbo jumbo. Please feel free to list some suggestions.
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Planning my mini media center
- Thread starter dtprkr
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It should stream fine with wireless but of course it will be much better and reliable to wire it up with Gigabit (CAT 6) cabling.
planning media centre
Hi
I am afraid you will be sadly disappointed with a media centre streaming anything but music wirelessly regardless of the speed
I have mac mini connected to 52" 1080p plugged to gige switch also connected to xbox 360 with a small 1.5 tb drive for sharing local content
that is all cat 5 back to/from my comms room where I have quad core pc and 16 tb hd for all media that airport extreme acts as the main distribution network
As it pushed out GIGe all switches are also GIG e
Additonal bedrooms and kitchen, pool area etc are fed by airport expresses but no video
all rooms can upload content but downloading vs streaming is the best method if going wireless
This all dependent on distances of course , mine are perhaps further apart and why wired is needed for my streaming
Hi
I am afraid you will be sadly disappointed with a media centre streaming anything but music wirelessly regardless of the speed
I have mac mini connected to 52" 1080p plugged to gige switch also connected to xbox 360 with a small 1.5 tb drive for sharing local content
that is all cat 5 back to/from my comms room where I have quad core pc and 16 tb hd for all media that airport extreme acts as the main distribution network
As it pushed out GIGe all switches are also GIG e
Additonal bedrooms and kitchen, pool area etc are fed by airport expresses but no video
all rooms can upload content but downloading vs streaming is the best method if going wireless
This all dependent on distances of course , mine are perhaps further apart and why wired is needed for my streaming
Um, I don't know what's most people's problem with streaming content. I have an AT&T wireless router/modem for the longest time with Hyper G and it handled streaming content; music, movies and photos like a champ. I recently upgraded to a Time Capsule and still streams like a champ. Just make the drives to be shared on the network to other Macs in the house.
Personally with my wireless experience I tell people who want to stream use wireless N. It's great and fast. I do however plan to make my media station wired. To stream my Macbook (distance to router: ~60-80 feet, in my room or ~40 feet or more upstairs next to my ATV) to my ATV (distance to router: ~40 feet) using a wireless G router (At&t) takes maybe 10-30 seconds to start streaming from my MacBook movie or tv show is less. I've upgraded the router to a TimeCapsule recently and it's roughly seems a little faster. The download speeds of a movie is maybe 2-5 mins for a movie to start playing or less. Um, my Chuck series was a little more cause of SD and HD but I watched it pretty fast. To be honest I don't see what's wrong with streaming and has been great to me, even if I download the movie directly to my atv. I've recently built my media center and have yet to try to stream that with my MacBook I'll let you know how that goes soon.