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Airport Extreme as a movie server?

jazz1

jazz1

macrumors 601
Original poster
I've got an 'N" not the new dual with a 500GB USB HD hooked up. If I put my movies on it how can I view them on my computer? I still want to keep my music on my local desktop, I just want a way to view the movies stored on the remote USB drive. Therefore I don't want to change the location of my entire media library that iTunes uses.

Any ideas?
 
Connect to the Airport HDD and then make an 'alias' and put it in your movies folder. Then you can use Front Row to access that drive and watch movies from it. I am not sure how the frame rate would be on playback, would be rather curious to hear about your experience (though an N router should be pretty quick).
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Connect to the Airport HDD and then make an 'alias' and put it in your movies folder. Then you can use Front Row to access that drive and watch movies from it. I am not sure how the frame rate would be on playback, would be rather curious to hear about your experience (though an N router should be pretty quick).
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Thank you so much! I will give it a go and report back. I may had to drop an ethernet cable if that doesn't work well.
 
I have my external 2tb lacie drive connected to my AEBS(old version) and use plex to watch all of my movies on any of my computers in my house regardless of where I am. Never had a problem with drop outs or stuttering and playback has been perfect. Let me know if you have any questions.
 
azdunerat said:
I have my external 2tb lacie drive connected to my AEBS(old version) and use plex to watch all of my movies on any of my computers in my house regardless of where I am. Never had a problem with drop outs or stuttering and playback has been perfect. Let me know if you have any questions.
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I don't know why I never thought of taking my own advice. I have a 1Tb connected to my Mini media machine and have just put an alias in my iMac's movies folder. Duh!
 
azdunerat said:
I have my external 2tb lacie drive connected to my AEBS(old version) and use plex to watch all of my movies on any of my computers in my house regardless of where I am. Never had a problem with drop outs or stuttering and playback has been perfect. Let me know if you have any questions.
Click to expand...

But do you mean standard .avis or HD .mkv files also? Did you try 1080p? Is wifi N that fast?

Thanks!
 
I would have thought the AEBS chipset to be the limiting factor here. While I can get a good 130-150mbps out of 802.11n fairly consistenly (in good conditions), getting above 10MBps (80mbps) through the Airdisk is rare.
 
The highest I have tried was a 720p .mkv rip I pulled off of the bay. Not sure if it was really that high of a frame rate but it played it just fine. Plex does have a nice buffer cache so that probably helps quite a bit.
 
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