I think for ATV to succeed iTunes must be fixed

[Eric-PTEK]

We got our new Apple TV and although there are some oddball bugs with it that may be related to my AVR over all it does what it needs to do.

The biggest problem with iTunes.

For the money we have invested in home entertainment the Apple TV is a cheap product. However the fact it must use Home Sharing to serve out audio and video is a pain.

I'd much rather it read off a share.

Still running it via iTunes and turning iTunes into more of a server app is fine but it fails as a server app.

Because I want this to work I will invest in a used Mac Mini to act as a 24/7 iTunes server for the ATV, or actually 2 ATV's.

I'll be able to listen to music, watch movies on the 2 TV's, my wife's iMac, my MBP or my Hack Pro.

But what about when I want to sync my iPhone, or her iPhone, or add new content/media I have to goto the Mini.

Apple really needs to make iTunes either multi-user or allow syncing of devices and importing of content via Home Share.

This isn't 10 years ago when it was a rarity to have 1 computer in a house. Now with all this convergence either Apple needs to make iTunes multi user, or come out with a iTunes server app.

At this point I'd even take a dedicated NAS that Apple markets with a built in iTunes server.

 

[newagemac]

The current setup works perfectly if you have desktops but laptops make it a bit more of a hassle because they aren't always plugged in and I don't think the Wireless Wake On Demand feature in Snow Leopard works if it isn't on a power source. Desktops can be left on all the time and you can even sleep them and they will wake up automatically when needed.

For this and other reasons, my wife and I recently switched to desktops as our main computers and we don't plan on ever buying laptops anymore and buying iPads instead for mobile use because any processor intensive stuff or powerful applications like Adobe CS5 are better done on more powerful desktops attached to large screens anyway. The light stuff like email, research, and web browsing we used to do with the laptop works better on an iPad. With this setup our computers are always on and iTunes is always open so the Apple TV always has access to each of our iTunes Libraries through Home Sharing. Plus it's cheaper!

So I think the idea that your computer is a server and each person has their own little server that stays on and can be accessed by other devices like the ATV, iPhone, and iPad at any time works well... as long as your "server" is a desktop or at least a laptop that you use like a desktop.