Help me serve my Apple TV

boomhower said:

I don't have the room on the MBP to let it live there.

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This should be simple unless I misunderstand you. Just put all the iTunes data from the mbp on an external hard drive. Then transfer it into a folder on the htpc. Then import the data into iTunes on the PC and turn on homesharing on both the htpc and the Apple TV.

boomhower said:

It's all new data, I want to start a collection. Homesharing is a windows thing, if there is a way to make it a Mac thing I'm all ears.

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Homesharing is an Apple thing but a Windows iTunes account can also use it to serve an Apple TV in the same way a mbp iTunes account would use it to serve an Apple TV. I am guessing your htpc is Windows?

Homesharing is the simple way that Apple provide to get the iTunes on your computer or multiple computers to appear on your Apple TV.

If you are going to maintain and add to your collection on the HTPC this should work no problem for you.

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Also you can use homesharing on iPads. I can see everybody eles iTunes librarys in our house on my iPad and watch or listen to anything right from the iPad. (With no Windows involved)

Also your mbp and your htpc can serve the Apple TV with whatever is in their respective iTunes libraries independently of each other as long as they all are using the same home sharing account and are on the same network. You can still have different accounts with apple for the iTunes store on the different computers but you must use the same home sharing account with all of them. You don't have to have a link to your HTPC from your mbp to see the htpc iTunes on the Apple TV. Your MBP can be turned off.

And you want get new videos etc for the collection on your mac and send it to the htpc on an ongoing basis? And then delete it from the mac?

External Hard Drive to transfer between the two is by far the simplest way. Why not just buy the video on the htpc or do the handbraking on the htpc and do the least moving possible.

One very simple way would be to use the shared hard drive on an airport extreme but that will be very slow even if your network is fast as it connects by USB.

boomhower said:

I have homesharing enabled but I need to move it from the MBP to the PC. The homesharing works seemlessly as expected.

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I am not totally sure I understand this. Your mac and your htpc should have the same home sharing email address and password. Even if the iTunes accounts on the two computers use different iTunes store accounts.

I have my HDD connected to my TC, and yes transfer is slower than usb. But I do my processing during the day and transfer to HDD at night. Usually takes 15m for a 1GB m4v, 1hr for a 5GB mkv (dvd backup file). Those are actually doable during the day while I am on the computer. For BR's, I do the transfer overnight.