Hello all,
I currently own a Macbook and I'm about to ditch my Vista PC (with Media Center extenders) for a new iMac and a couple of Apple TVs.
However before I take the plunge I want to have a plan for sharing music, photos, and movies (mainly home videos) between the MacBook, the iMac, and the Apple TVs.
I had always imagined that the best possible solution would be some kind of media server that was independent of any of the client systems. This server would be highly expandable, accessible from the Internet and would be backed up regularly. Oh, and all clients would share the same media metadata, whether it was photo tags, album art, playlists, etc.
However I don't think such a solution currently exists. My first inclination was to pick up one of the new 1 TB Time Capsules. However, I don't know what this really gets me. For one thing, I already have a wireless access point. Secondly, it doesn't seem to offer any media server functionality - i.e. each client would still maintain it's own music/photo libraries. It's basically a very expensive network drive. Oh, and it can also be used for Time Machine backups - but if all my most critical files (music, photos, video) are stored on the Time Capsule shared disk, why on earth would I back them all up to that same disk?
So what I'm leaning towards (until a true media server comes along) is buying the top of the line iMac with a 1TB hard drive, and basically storing all my music/videos/photos on that machine. I would create a file share for the videos so that I could access them from my Macbook, and I would set up iTunes and iPhoto to share their libraries for use on my Macbook (I'm curious, how well does this work?).
And of course Apple TV would access the media libraries on my iMac.
Unless I'm mistaken, with this approach I get to only maintain one iTunes library (on the iMac) with shared playlists, etc., and only one iPhoto library (on the iMac) with a single set of metadata (places, faces, etc.).
As for videos, in an ideal world I would store all my raw footage in the shared folder on the iMac for editing in iMovie locally or from my Macbook (oh and hopefully I could share iMovie projects between the two computers, but I'm probably getting too ambitious).
As for backup, I already use Mozy for online backup so I'd just backup my iMac this way.
So, a fairly long post for a fairly simple question - is there any reason for me to invest $400 in a Time Capsule in order to share media files on my network? Or would an iMac with a huge hard drive (and iTunes/iPhoto library sharing) do basically the same thing?
Thanks in advance....
I currently own a Macbook and I'm about to ditch my Vista PC (with Media Center extenders) for a new iMac and a couple of Apple TVs.
However before I take the plunge I want to have a plan for sharing music, photos, and movies (mainly home videos) between the MacBook, the iMac, and the Apple TVs.
I had always imagined that the best possible solution would be some kind of media server that was independent of any of the client systems. This server would be highly expandable, accessible from the Internet and would be backed up regularly. Oh, and all clients would share the same media metadata, whether it was photo tags, album art, playlists, etc.
However I don't think such a solution currently exists. My first inclination was to pick up one of the new 1 TB Time Capsules. However, I don't know what this really gets me. For one thing, I already have a wireless access point. Secondly, it doesn't seem to offer any media server functionality - i.e. each client would still maintain it's own music/photo libraries. It's basically a very expensive network drive. Oh, and it can also be used for Time Machine backups - but if all my most critical files (music, photos, video) are stored on the Time Capsule shared disk, why on earth would I back them all up to that same disk?
So what I'm leaning towards (until a true media server comes along) is buying the top of the line iMac with a 1TB hard drive, and basically storing all my music/videos/photos on that machine. I would create a file share for the videos so that I could access them from my Macbook, and I would set up iTunes and iPhoto to share their libraries for use on my Macbook (I'm curious, how well does this work?).
And of course Apple TV would access the media libraries on my iMac.
Unless I'm mistaken, with this approach I get to only maintain one iTunes library (on the iMac) with shared playlists, etc., and only one iPhoto library (on the iMac) with a single set of metadata (places, faces, etc.).
As for videos, in an ideal world I would store all my raw footage in the shared folder on the iMac for editing in iMovie locally or from my Macbook (oh and hopefully I could share iMovie projects between the two computers, but I'm probably getting too ambitious).
As for backup, I already use Mozy for online backup so I'd just backup my iMac this way.
So, a fairly long post for a fairly simple question - is there any reason for me to invest $400 in a Time Capsule in order to share media files on my network? Or would an iMac with a huge hard drive (and iTunes/iPhoto library sharing) do basically the same thing?
Thanks in advance....