Setting up mixed ht

[rafverh]

Hi all,

I'm new to this forum (and only a few months with Mac). In the process of completing my full setup at home i have the following issue.

I have 2 rooms where i want to stream stuff to :

1. cinema room where i want to stream movies & music to
2. audio room where i want to stream music in high quality to

What is the issue ?

Well in room 1 the library (play lists & ratings) are from a different user then the library i want to stream to room 2.

I'm going to install a Mini mac with snow leopard server as a file server so the audio files will be on this machine.

further more there will are 2 imacs connected to the network (myselfs and my wife's) but we do not want to leave these machines running all the time.

As i understand i cannot run 2 instances of itunes ?
so i will need to put a mini (or something else) in one room in order to run it's own itunes library. In the other room (probably the cinema) i can work with an apple TV connected to the mini mac server install ?

now i'm using Airport express to stream music to both of these rooms but based on the same itunes library. This is not what i want.

Does anybody have any other idea's ?

Here's a picture of what i had in mind, however with one of the mini's being an apple tv, but i find this setup quite expensive.




thanks

 

[waw74]

you say 2 instances of iTunes, what exactly do you mean?

you can have 2 TVs synced to the same master library, so you could just have the one library on your server. you could even access that library from your and your wife's iMacs.

also look into iTunes home server I haven't really played with it, but you can set it up so that iTunes automatically downloads anything you buy (from iTunes) on another computer on your network (up to 5 computers), I haven't really played with this too much. you can also manually import parts of shared libraries.

also if you're planning on getting a mini and an tv, i would put the mini in the video room, you can run something like Plex on it, or if you rent a DVD you can play it directly.
Also with plex, if you do have multiple iTunes libraries on multiple computers, you can run plex media server on your different computers, you'll then be able to access those iTunes libraries (wither or not iTunes is running, although the computer has to be on) from within Plex on another machine, and it's pretty easy to switch from one shared library to another.

also Hulu Desktop is a pretty nice application for dealing with hulu.

 

[rafverh]

Thanks for the reply

Well when i mean 2 instances, it is the following.
Now my imac is running with my library and my wife's imac is running with her library. Using airport extreme, with the iphone remote we can choose which one we want to listen to, since they are both running. However, if they could both be running on the same machine, say the mini server, we could use for both rooms a simple apple tv ?

The plex solution seems to be a good route to look @. If i understand correctly both the libraries can be on the same machine, however this machine does not have to run itunes, eventhough the machine would have to be running, which is not an issue.

i'll try it.