MBA + Apple TV: What to do...

[thankins]

Hopefully you guys and lend a hand in my problems.

I have a Rev A Macbook Ait (1.6 80 GB HD model) and recently purchased a 160 GB Apple TV. My issues are as followed:

1. I have a handful of mkv files sitting on an external drive right now. I am worried that my MBA won't be able to process them in HandBrake without blowing up. Should I look at getting a cheap desktop PC to handle this?

2. Where should I store my videos/music? I have about 3 TBs of external HD space connected to my AEBS that is free and though I could store my movies there but got worried when ppl said that streaming from the AEBS to the MBA to the Apple TV would be SLOW!!

If I moved my iTunes lib (by that I mean tell iTunes that the location is not in my user folder) to an external drive that is connected to the AEBS and tell Apple TV to only sync the most recent data (i.e. store it on the HD of the aTV) would I notice a slowdown?


3. Would it be a better idea just to connect a USB drive to my MBA and overlook the AEBS entirely?

4. Finally I have two different AEBS in the house and one is connected to the Apple TV via a ethernet connection. We will call it Point B it is extending the wireless signal from Point A. If I plug the large external drive into Point B that is also connected to the AEBS would I still see a slowdown in data transfer seeing as though they are connected to the same device?

Sorry for all the questions. Just curious on what the optimal setup would be and how to get the most out of my hardware. Still have to make the gf warm up to that idea that the Apple TV is worth the money we spent on it.......

Cheers!

 

[ltsching]

Hi, I had my iTunes/iPhoto library on a 500G Time Capsule and sync/stream to my 40G TV with my Rev. A MBA since last June and have recently moved my libraries to an external USB drive. While I had no problem streaming video or music content from the TC to TV, the streaming works extremely well, I had difficulty with using iTunes/iPhoto wirelessly with my MBA. It was painfully slow for transferring and downloading files and I had occasional drop offs that I would not consider a good-user experience. I have also installed Boxee and can stream non-iTunes files to TV with great success.
By the way, encoding will be long regardless. I find my MBA encodes to mp4 files about the same time as my wife's latest unibody MacBook.

 

[thankins]

Hi, I had my iTunes/iPhoto library on a 500G Time Capsule and sync/stream to my 40G TV with my Rev. A MBA since last June and have recently moved my libraries to an external USB drive. While I had no problem streaming video or music content from the TC to TV, the streaming works extremely well, I had difficulty with using iTunes/iPhoto wirelessly with my MBA. It was painfully slow for transferring and downloading files and I had occasional drop offs that I would not consider a good-user experience. I have also installed Boxee and can stream non-iTunes files to TV with great success.
By the way, encoding will be long regardless. I find my MBA encodes to mp4 files about the same time as my wife's latest unibody MacBook.

Thank you for your reply. I suppose I am going to have to give it a shot and see myself what sorta problems I will run into. I will attempt the external drive connected to my AEBS and see what happens. I don't really care about the streaming from it to my MBA as much as I care about the streaming/syncing to the Apple tv

Thanks again