I have set up one of my Mac Pros with about 12TBs and loaded iTunes with couple hundred movies and tv shows, which supply 4 Apple TV's gen 2 all connected via Cat 5 ethernet cable. My question is does anyone have a similar setup/ configuration?
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Any one using multiple Apple TV's powered by Mac Pro Server as Media Centre
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elementskins
macrumors member
I have a Mac Pro 3,1 with 10tb of storage, 5tb of which are dedicated to iTunes movies (all 720p HD), and another 500gb of Music. This serves 3x Apple TV 2nd Gen boxes, all which connect wirelessly via an Airport Extreme Base Station. One of the Apple TV's is in the house next door. Works like a charm.
I have nothing that overkill....yet
We run 3 ATV3's over the 5GHz band on our AEBS (because the wire closet isn't done; because I've been lazy) from a Windows 7 'Media' Server. I say "media" because it's a W7U Core 2 Duo w/8GB RAM running basically iTunes, Office and MakeMKV for BD. She's watching something in the bedroom and I have SWEIII going on my SW Labor Day Marathon. Everything runs like a champ!
Part of me is confused about your thread. Are you having issues or just showing off 😀 😎
We run 3 ATV3's over the 5GHz band on our AEBS (because the wire closet isn't done; because I've been lazy) from a Windows 7 'Media' Server. I say "media" because it's a W7U Core 2 Duo w/8GB RAM running basically iTunes, Office and MakeMKV for BD. She's watching something in the bedroom and I have SWEIII going on my SW Labor Day Marathon. Everything runs like a champ!
Part of me is confused about your thread. Are you having issues or just showing off 😀 😎
Not bragging just curious if anyone else has a similar system set up, and mine works great have had all ATVs playing full 720p videos with no problems. The other part about is I have a few buddies/clients that want me to build a system for their homes and wanted to see if the idea was marketable out side these couple clients.
(I was hoping you were just bragging, now I get to ask you questions about your setup 😀 )
On our setup, I have been ripping only DVDs. I need a much more powerful machine to do our BD encoding. I'm watching an episode of Band of Brothers encode on my ubuntu box (one of my encoding slaves) and it looks like its going at 2fps (average). Now I'm using the ATV3 preset for everything, and using stock Apple FW on my ATV3's since, well, there isn't a JB for it yet. I was encoding at High Profile until the ATV3 preset came out, and I can't really see/hear a difference between them.
I will be getting a mini whenever the hell they refresh, and I'm planning on upgrading it (biggest HDDs I can find and server OS) to run our house o' Apple gear and do our BD encodes.
Now my question to you is what are you using to do your encoding, and about what are your file sizes? I'm only throwing around 500MB (TV) and 2GB (Movie) at a time, and I enjoy watching the activity monitor and our 'server' doesn't even break a sweat.
I would like an Apple computer you could plug 4 to 8 hard drives into for home sharing. A Mac Pro is overkill, but it does that.
How is your Mac Pro connected to the ATV's? I'm currently renovating and have run Cat 6 from my office upstairs throughout the first floor - is that all that's needed?
Thanks.
Thanks.
I'm using Media Convertor software, and running about 1 gig for 30 min shows aka 4000KBPS and 5-9 gigs for movies for blu-ray aka 9000KBPS.
My setup is Cat5 cables going through about 4 10 port T100 NetGear switches and the through put is perfect at the quality I have my media at.
I'm waiting for the new Mac Mini server update and building a thunderbolt external Raid for clients looking for this multiple room Media Centre.
That computer is meant to do a hell of a lot more than stream to a couple Apple TVs man. 😱
I have a core i5 mini with 8GB of RAM pretty much dedicated to serving media to the TVs in my apartment. Got 3 Xbox 360s, 2 PS3s, and a Roku. I run plex on the mini so that I don't have to convert all my video to iTunes format, and plex streams to PS3 and Xbox 360 with no additional setup. Just set up the plex server on your network, and the game systems see it and you're good to go. On the Roku, you download Plex from the channel store and you're done.
The set up works great.. Rarely have an issue even when streaming to more than one device at a time.. Always at least 720p files.
I have a core i5 mini with 8GB of RAM pretty much dedicated to serving media to the TVs in my apartment. Got 3 Xbox 360s, 2 PS3s, and a Roku. I run plex on the mini so that I don't have to convert all my video to iTunes format, and plex streams to PS3 and Xbox 360 with no additional setup. Just set up the plex server on your network, and the game systems see it and you're good to go. On the Roku, you download Plex from the channel store and you're done.
The set up works great.. Rarely have an issue even when streaming to more than one device at a time.. Always at least 720p files.
I know it can handle the steaming, hell I've got G4 powermacs that can easily handle that. I'm just concerned about how long it can handle processing video at at close to 80-90% use of the processor for 48-72 hours at a time. I know i5s and i7s are great have them in my MBPs, its just how long they can take the workload before craping out being they are a mobile processor. I know xeons will and have been one of my MP that I've had sense 2006 rarely if ever isn't at 80% capacity for the past 3 years.
garybUK
Guest
I have x4 AppleTV 3's connecting to iTunes running on a HP ML110 G7 E-1220 running ESXi (Windows 8 server VM with iTunes installed). The only thing that is processed is network wise, AppleTV's copy down the file into their buffer memory and play from that, so the server does very little in terms of CPU.
Media conversion, I do on a Quad Core i7 Desktop PC using handbrake.
Media conversion, I do on a Quad Core i7 Desktop PC using handbrake.
If you don't mind my asking, how do you have your storage configured. I've always thought it would be great to run the server as a VM but haven't figured out how to come up with a couple terabytes of storage for the files.
garybUK
Guest
x2 2TB LUN's in ESXi (ESXi only see's <=2tb ) which is a bit pants. one's mounted in windows as D:\iTunes\Media\Movies and the other is mounted as D:\iTunes\Media\ so movies are on 1 disk and everything else on another, this is invisible to windows/itunes. Then just run iTunes like on any other system.
I've actually just replaced the HP with a Fujitsu E1330 with 16gb RAM and x2 3TB WD Red Drives + x2 2TB Seagate HDD's. Very happy.