NAS / ATV / Mac Mini Issues

[jlc1978]

Here's the setup - Synology NAS with my iTunes Library, Mac Mini (Snow Leopard due to Mini's age) acting as server. iTunes library is pointed to the NAS and generally works fine. ATV connects via Home Sharing and works greta. However, periodically I get a cannot find file error. If I go to the Mac Mini and click on the file, it starts and now works from the ATV as well. Sometime sit's just Movies, others TV shows; though often only some episodes.

Any ideas?

 

[Panch0]

My issue with a similar setup was that after a reboot, the NAS drive would not be mounted before iTunes restarted. As a result, iTunes would decide that all of it's media files were unavailable. I'm not sure that your issue where only some content is missing would be the same, just sharing. This was what sent me back to direct connect storage for iTunes...

 

[Boyd01]

My iTunes library is currently located on a network drive, and after a couple months of running this way I've decided it's a bad idea. If the drive isn't available for whatever reason, then it creates problems in iTunes. Once I had major corruption of the library database and iTunes stopped displaying cover art for some of my movies, in spite of the fact that the art was really there. Took a little while to fix that up. I've seen other posts here where people have given up on using NAS for their iTunes libraries and are now just using them for backups.

But I am using a MacBook Air, so that gets even trickier when you move it around the house, put it to sleep, unplug the ethernet adapter, etc.

I have a new mac mini arriving tomorrow and am going to leave it running iTunes all the time with the library on a USB3 disk. This should also improve performance since the USB drive clocks at about 160MB/s which is better than you can do over ethernet with NAS.