Streaming from Mac Mini to 2 Apple TVs

The setup is as follows:

500GB Maxtor 3200 External USB 2.0 drive connected to Mac Mini, Mac Mini connected via cat 6 to Time Capsule (1000baseT), and 2xAppleTV connected via 802.11n.

I want to stream to each AppleTV at the same time and that seems to work okay when streaming DVD quality content. HD content will stutter and freeze though as it tries to fill the buffer.

The bottleneck seems to be the external drive, but what can be done about it? I want to stream (not sync) from a single external drive.

Cave Man said:

The bottleneck is your wireless connection.

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I currently have it in 802.11g compatibility mode which limits 802.11n speeds to 130mbit of a maximum 300mbit according to the standard as I recall.

I take it that 1 AppleTV will receive 130mbit while 2 AppleTVs will receive 65mbit each? I wasn't aware it was divided like that if it is true.

VTMac said:

That is essentially correct. Though in reality, due to error rates and general noise, you will never get close to 130mbit. More like 50-70 mbit. So it's more like 25-35 mbit for each stream. That's not going to cut it for 2 hd streams, especially if that wifi is being used for any "normal" computing.

Click to expand...

I've never really cared to know much about the wireless router except that it is properly secured and that it connects to devices properly.

I've switched the router to 802.11n 5GHz only mode and the performance has improved dramatically. I just hooked up an older Linksys 802.11g (WRT54g) router to the Time Capsule to allow the devices that depend on 802.11g to access the network wirelessly.

It is now capable of handling 2 Macbook Airs, a Macbook, a Macbook Pro, and 2 AppleTVs streaming HD all connected via 802.11n (figured I would really give it hell when friends were over with their machines).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I hadn't given the wireless connection part of it much thought.