Can I use Airport extreme to wirelessly stream video to ATV2?

[madflavour]

I currently use a western digital external HD, connected to my MBP, to store my iTunes library. I would like to free up the MBP when streaming audio/video to various ATV's and airport express's around the house. I would like to connect the HD to the network via an airport extreme and was wondering about the feasibility of this. Would the connection be viable? Fast enough?
Does anyone have any better ideas to fix this. I am moderately technical and I'm willing to gen up on anything that would be new to me.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Omne666]

If your trying to totally negate having the MB running, your outta luck. You can certainly hook the hdd to the airport extreme, but iTunes still needs to access it, and be running to stream to the atvs
If its an atv2 you could jailbreak it and then release the mbp from its chains, but that's the only way.

 

[madflavour]

If your trying to totally negate having the MB running, your outta luck. You can certainly hook the hdd to the airport extreme, but iTunes still needs to access it, and be running to stream to the atvs
If its an atv2 you could jailbreak it and then release the mbp from its chains, but that's the only way.

Hi, Thanks so much for the reply. No, I'm not trying to remove the MBP from the loop, I am more concerned with data transfer rates. As the transfer from the MBP to the ATV is sufficiently quick enough to watch movies this way I was hoping that transfer from the HD now wirelessly linked to the MBP would not hinder the process.

 

[HotRodGuy]

If your trying to totally negate having the MB running, your outta luck. You can certainly hook the hdd to the airport extreme, but iTunes still needs to access it, and be running to stream to the atvs
If its an atv2 you could jailbreak it and then release the mbp from its chains, but that's the only way.

Can you give me some more detail on this?

 

[ftaok]

Hi, Thanks so much for the reply. No, I'm not trying to remove the MBP from the loop, I am more concerned with data transfer rates. As the transfer from the MBP to the ATV is sufficiently quick enough to watch movies this way I was hoping that transfer from the HD now wirelessly linked to the MBP would not hinder the process.

I'm thinking this type of set-up would adversely affect your data rates. My thinking is that the data would have to transfer like this ...

AEBS > MBP > AEBS > aTV

That's three separate sets of data that has to transfer across your network.

In the traditional set-up, you eliminate 2 of those 3 transfers.

However, whether you'd notice the impact or not, I can't say. I'm guessing on high bitrate HD files, you'd probably notice.

 

[brentmore]

I currently use a western digital external HD, connected to my MBP, to store my iTunes library. I would like to free up the MBP when streaming audio/video to various ATV's and airport express's around the house. I would like to connect the HD to the network via an airport extreme and was wondering about the feasibility of this. Would the connection be viable? Fast enough?
Does anyone have any better ideas to fix this. I am moderately technical and I'm willing to gen up on anything that would be new to me.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

Have you considered a NAS for your streaming? It would reduce the number of hops across the network and generally provide a higher throughput to your ATV/other device. I use a Synology, but there are plenty of other options.

 

[Omne666]

Have you considered a NAS for your streaming? It would reduce the number of hops across the network and generally provide a higher throughput to your ATV/other device. I use a Synology, but there are plenty of other options.

Actually, unless you jailbreak the atv, what hoops are you saving? The data still goes to the MBP from wherever you have the NAS, then to the AE then to the atv. seems the same to me.

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Can you give me some more detail on this?

jailbreaking? or using an external drive on the airport extreme?

 

[GarrettL1979]

I'm also curious about how this has worked for some. I have an Airport Extreme, and it would be nice to connect an external hard drive (w/my iTunes library) to it. For this who have done this, does it work well when streaming to an ATV?

 

[angelsguardian]

From my experience having your iTunes library remotely is pointless as it creates extra traffic and leads to delays and buffering which we all find annoying. Of course this is all because iTunes has to be running on a computer to retrieve the files from the remote disc then serve them to the ATV's. To solve this I bought an old iMac (last of the white machines) for £300 inc. postage. To this I added a USB external non bus powered drive to store the library. This is connected by wired gigabit ethernet to my router which then provides fast wireless to two ATV3's. This has worked perfectly for the month it's been running.

 

[HotRodGuy]

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jailbreaking? or using an external drive on the airport extreme?

Both actually. I have two ATV2's in the house. About to add an extreme, would love to be able to use the extreme and add an external that would be used as my itunes server (preventing me from having to have itunes opened on a computer). Is this even possible?

 

[GarrettL1979]

From my experience having your iTunes library remotely is pointless as it creates extra traffic and leads to delays and buffering which we all find annoying.

I figured this would be case, but it would nice if it worked well. I went ahead and replaced the HD in my 2011 MBP with a 1TB drive instead. This has worked really well.