Apple TV2 Streaming issues (USB External Drive)

Hi All.

Apologies if this has already been covered.

My iMac 500gb drive has filled up (mainly TV shows) , so I transferred the media to my 500GB USB2 WD external drive, and re-added it to iTunes (With the "Copy new media to iTunes folder" feature turned off.

However, now when playing the media, Apple TV becomes unresponsive and Errors out. (only on the USB media, not the media on the iMac Hardrive).

The work around at the moment is to pause the video and let it buffer. It still sometimes errors out ( about 40% of the time).

My questions are:

1) Is the lag purely because Apple TV is sourcing a movie through the iMac which has to come from the hard drive (as USB2 is quite slow) , and

2) If i purchased an AC powered 1TB external (WD) that has a FireWire 800 connection, will this lower the lag?


Thanks in advance guys.

radiogoober said:

Is it Apple TV 2 or 3? Is your AppleTV jailbroken in anyway?

Edit: I just noticed your asked about buying an AC powered FW 800 drive. Is the WD USB drive you're using not AC powered? Is it only powered off the USB cord?

Click to expand...

Yes the existing usb2 one is USB powered. The one I am looking at getting is ac powered .

iTunes and apple tv are up to date . And the apple tv is the 2. ( black box not 1080p ).

So the issue could be the USB cable ? It's just the stock one that came with the drive .


Thanks for your replies . Is it right to assume that the opinion is that getting the FW 800 ac powered external would possibly increase the buffer speed , but shouldn't be necessary ( ie USB2 should be sweet )

----------

Thanks for your replies - I have looked into the router configuration , as a friend suggests that a poor router would lag the buffer .

Router settings look ok - plus it worked fine when apple tv was streaming it straight from internal
Mac HD so this would make me think it isn't the router .

I am probably going to buy the FW800 ac powered hard drive anyway ( as I need the space ) so I hope that fixes it.

Interesting however to hear people with the same setup without problems though

----------

radiogoober said:

Is it Apple TV 2 or 3? Is your AppleTV jailbroken in anyway?

Edit: I just noticed your asked about buying an AC powered FW 800 drive. Is the WD USB drive you're using not AC powered? Is it only powered off the USB cord?

Click to expand...

No - not jail broken . Cheers

Sounds good. Thanks all the way from new Zealand