Will this PC stream to Apple TV

Ok, so I have a PC that I'm pulling out of the mix (semi retiring)...

It's lived a long productive life, and it's only being retired due to one website it has trouble with (flash based)...

Otherwise, while certainly not my daily machine, it has remained fairly useful for the purpose it had.

To this point, my Mac Pro has doubled as my primary machine, and my iTunes sharing machine for my Apple TV's.

I have 3 Apple TV 3rd generation units running 3 TV's in the house.

I have never liked the Mac Pro being used for this purpose, because that machine ideally needs sandboxed and entirely of the internet and any networks. Not getting into the reason.... Essentially it is of critical security.

The Mac Pro holds data that cannot be risked, either by compromise or by loss.

So, as such, the iTunes library needs offloaded to another machine, and the Mac Pro needs off of all networks.

Since I am retiring this other PC from its prior purpose, it seems logical to consider it as a dedicated purpose media streaming device.

The computer has an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ running at 2.2 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM. It is configured to dual boot Windows XP Home and Windows Vista Ultimate.

It will be configured to be using either it's built-in crappy integrated video controller, or perhaps I'll put in an ATI AGP card I have.

My thought is that this computer will not be used to play any videos directly. I only intend to load iTunes on it, copy my library of music and movies over to it, and share the library with my Apple TV's like I currently do.

The videos will be a mix of MP4's created from DVD's using Handbrake, in high profile mode. And also some standard and high definition movies purchased through the iTunes Store.

Before I waste the time to do all the work, I thought I'd see what other people's experience has been in this area with similar spec machines.

Again, I am certain that I do not need to play any videos directly on this PC. It would only be used to feed the Apple TV's (3 of them) all 3rd generation. Typically only 1 TV is in use at a time. Extremely rarely, perhaps 2 of them.

The sharing would occur over the same hard wired network I'm using now without problem.

Thoughts on whether the video will play fine on the Apple TV's with this 2.2 GHz Athlon XP 3200+ Supplying the stream?

Any technical, performance, decoding, etc. issues foreseen?

Experiences?

Appreciate your thought....

 

Thank you for your thoughts. I figured if someone had done this with a similar machine and had significant issues, then I'd know not to waste my time.

When I get a pause in my schedule I'll work on moving things over to the PC and see how it goes.

 

All good suggestions. I am hoping this machine will stream to the Apple TV without trouble.

At this moment my budget is too tight to buy another machine. That's why I'm trying to repurpose this machine that just got replaced.

I'm trying to get all the iTunes stuff in a separate machine so that the AppleTV stuff isn't pulling from critical computers.

 

I got it all set up today. The PC I detailed above is working fine as a streaming server. As expected, it cannot play any of the videos / movies directly on it's own screen, even with an nVidia 6200 AGP graphics card.

But, the video is streaming very well to the Apple TV's from the PC. I might actually be seeing better video quality on the Apple TV's than I was with the Mac Pro as the streaming source. The video actually seems to be streaming faster / caching faster to the Apple TV's. If I push the up arrow on the Apple TV remotes to see the progress bar, the loading / caching is occurring much faster than my 2006 Mac Pro was delivering. Which is kind of interesting.

Rather than mess around with piecing it back together, I just duplicated my external terabyte firewire drive to a similar terabyte USB 2.0 hard drive for the Windows Machine. Naturally, I made sure that the drive for the PC was formatted to NTFS before I copied my Mac's drive to it (just did a content copy / exact duplicate - aside from partition format).

I then just renamed the iTunes Library file to have an ITL extension, and pointed Windows's iTunes to the library.

The only catch I found, is that iTunes 12.1.x would not install on the PC using either Vista or XP. So, I had to step back to iTunes 12.0.1.26 to get it to work. I just unchecked the auto-update to prevent me from getting accidentally updated into a nonfunctional iTunes. Despite my PC exceeding the minimum requirements, 12.1.x claimed my machine didn't meet the minimum requirements. I found in other websites that this has been a common occurrence with 12.1.x.

Considering that I was still using iTunes 11.x on my Mac, this should be fine for a while.

I ended up choosing to use my XP installation instead of Vista just because I grew impatient with Vista's delay in doing everything. A half hour to open a file is ridiculous. XP was doing it instantly.

My XP partition is updated as current as possible, with a current firewall and Antivirus protecting it. Though as a dedicated video streamer, I'm less concerned about it.

I've verified that my movie collection is intact and the streaming of HD video is going smooth and looks great on the Apple TV's.