Apple TV 2 and NAS drive...

It works.

The Apple TV will only connect to your MBA, not directly to the NAS - so you'll be streaming from the NAS to the MBA to the ATV. There could be a performance hit, but if you're running on a N network you might be just fine.

Not completely analagous to your situation, but we have a MacBook Pro w/ our iTunes library (approx. 150 GB) stored on our 2 TB Time Capsule. All parts of our wireless network utilize the 5 GHz band on the internal router of the Time Capsule. Our ATV2 has no performance issues wirelessly streaming content from the iTunes library via the MacBook.

The only issue that we have encountered is iTunes (and by proxy our ATV2) occasionally "loses" the library on the Time Capsule. One way we have found to solve this issue is to make sure the Time Capsule is "connected" to our MacBook prior to starting up iTunes.

Cheers,

Treycal

You can consider an external hard drive and use it for time machine as well

monaarts said:

Hey guys,

I know that there have been alot of threads about this but no one has ever verified whether they have done it or not…

I am considering purchasing a MacBook Air but I have an iTunes library with 10 GB in music and 150GB in movies, so this library wouldn't work on a MBA for long. So I am considering purchasing a 2TB NAS drive and storing my movies on it, but storing my music on my laptop (I listen to music while at school but never watch movies).

I have a dual band N router, so my AppleTV and Macbook will be hooked up to a 5GHz connection while everything else is 2.4GHz. Has anyone attempted to play videos stored on a NAS to the iTunes on their Mac to the AppleTV?? If so, how well did it work (or not work)?

Thanks guys!


- Joe

Click to expand...

I have a Belkin-N "Play" Router, dual-band. I really wanted a Time Capsule but I had two very large hard drives lying around and I didn't want them to go to waste and I didn't want to spend 200-300 dollars besides. The router has a single USB port but takes a hub. Downside is it requires it's own proprietary software in order to acess the NAS, but it's not a huge deal.

In short, it seems like I'm getting about 2mb/sec when the router is devoted to NAS activities (read/write), which is a little slow when I'm copying stuff to the drives (most large tasks have to be set up overnight), but actually works fine for movies. I've noticed it takes about 30 seconds longer to queue up a movie then when my movies were stored locally on my Macbook, but it's trivial - and there's no stuttering or buffering during playback - works fine.

I am using a similar set up at the moment. Apple tv 2, iMac and net gear ready NAS duo and it works fine. Videos stream without buffering. The only difference I noticed was it takes slightly longer to start playing from the time you select your movie on the apple tv to the time it starts playing on the tv set. Other than that a perfect set up. Just wish I didn't have to turn my mac on every time.

My Internet speed isn't fantastic either so it should work no problems for you. Also my set up is done all wireless. NAS box plugged into router then iMac and apple tv wireless.

The ready NAS duo is a fairly average NAS box as well so you can get ones with much faster processors.

Hope this helps.

You have to jailbreak your apple TV

I has a buffalo NAS drive which is streaming directly to my apple tv 2. i had to jailbreak ATV2 using seas0npass then installed XBMC. it works really well over my wireless N network for music and movies stored on the on the NAS, it also allows me to play avi, mkv etc. too!

johngalt? said:

I has a buffalo NAS drive which is streaming directly to my apple tv 2. i had to jailbreak ATV2 using seas0npass then installed XBMC. it works really well over my wireless N network for music and movies stored on the on the NAS, it also allows me to play avi, mkv etc. too!

Click to expand...

I've just jailbroken my ATV2 and considering a NAS to host all my media, I'm not using XBMC, but just the media player that is installed on the main menu. I've managed to stream videos from my iMac successfully, but wondering if the NAS will work in an identical way if I just connect to it with AFP? (I'm a complete NAS noob) - I'm particularly interested in streaming mkv files and ive had conflicting reports about the NAS actually transcoding or if the ATV itself does it?

Any help appreciated!