Help with an external Hard Drive

[UncleheFTy]

Good morning,

We have three machines in our house - mine which is an old Macbookpro (intel), a G5 (PowerPC) and a spanking new Macbookpro. In addition we have Airport Express, Apple TV and TimeCapsule but we want to have a reasonable sized storage for all our movies and to allow all three machines to be able to use Handbrake (pretty good tool) to copy our growing DVD and VHS library from any of the machines, store them on a central drive (access by ITunes from each of our machines) and then see them via AppleTV. Is that too difficult a task? If not does anyone have a good recommendation for an external drive and where should it be located? Next to the router, next to Airport EXpress, on one of the three machines?

Help please.

Uncle H

 

[walterwhite]

Storage sizes are now quite affordable... 4TB Lacie $599 or less and other examples to be found in the "googleshpere"... the LARGE HD would hold all of you Library but keep in mind you would want a separate unit to back up all your movies and such.

So all of those machines are running Handbrake (I also love this Application) and you want to dump them so you apple TV (assuming new) can see it all. Well if you use screen sharing on all units, you can decode/encode with handbrake on any unit then transfer the file to the main unit and dump into the main iTunes... that iTunes would then hold all of your movies and music and share to the Apple TV. Screen share will come in handy... we have a broken MacBook Pro (cracked screen) and we use it to play movies and such in this exact way... use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a connection to your widescreen TV and you have a cool big screen monitor on your TV.

You can also use Remote desktop but that may be overkill since screen share does it all as long as all computers are on the same subnet or you are using MObileMe

WW