Store movies on hd connected to extreme bs and play wirelessly on mac.

[jeb1]

Hi,
Is anyone using the set up of playing your movies in itunes from a hard drive that is connected to an airport extreme base station. I am trying to do this but they are lagging a bit. Ideally i want to create a movie collection and store it all on the external hard-drive so not to take up space on my mac book pro, but i dont want an external hard-drive plugged into my mac either so i figured this would be the best way to go about it. Am i asking too much here? Also if i buy an apple tv in future will it stream the films off the hard drive without my macbook being turned on?
Finally my last question is this. My movies are in .mkv format. What is the best file format to convert them too to keep the 720p quality? Or should i just choose save as in quicktime and save a reference file for itunes to point too. That way i dont have to convert them then but am not sure if this will work with apple tv.
Sorry if i have babbled on a bit i hope someone can help me.

 

[geoffreak]

You will be limited by three things:
- the processor of the Airport Extreme and its ability to serve files from a drive
- the speed of the local network
- the processor of the device playing the files
It is not possible to overcome the first limitation as long as you use the device.

MKV is just a container; The bitrate and format of the video and audio streams are what are relevant. You will lose quality converting to any other format or bitrate, but be warned that if you buy an AppleTV, it will not be able to play media in MKV containers, and the codec selection is very limited.
The AppleTV streams media off its own hard drive as it uses it.

 

[jeb1]

You will be limited by three things:
- the processor of the Airport Extreme and its ability to serve files from a drive
- the speed of the local network
- the processor of the device playing the files
It is not possible to overcome the first limitation as long as you use the device.

MKV is just a container; The bitrate and format of the video and audio streams are what are relevant. You will lose quality converting to any other format or bitrate, but be warned that if you buy an AppleTV, it will not be able to play media in MKV containers, and the codec selection is very limited.
The AppleTV streams media off its own hard drive as it uses it.

So am i better off getting a bigger internal hard-drive on my macbook? Also what is the biggest hard-drive i can put into it? Im thinking maybe getting a macbook was not such a good idea. Maybe i should just have an imac with a big external hd and stream to the tv with apple tv.