cody69

Mainly a convenience factor as the ATV and iMac are on separate floors in the house, and inevitably when I want to watch the ATV, I have to run upstairs to start iTunes or boot up the iMac. The latest ATV4. Interesting to learn there's a Plex app for ATV 4... sounds like there's a path to stream movies to the ATV without requiring iTunes to be running on a mac. Some good suggestions here, thanks!

I want to consolidate the storage across the devices in my house, but could use some advise and guidance. BACKGROUND: - I have a mac mini that serves as a music server for ~1TB of lossless iTunes music; connects to local USB DAC in media room and stream to several Aiport Expresses through out the house. - An iMac is used for video editing and photos, stored in iTunes & iPhoto, and streamed to an ATV. Current size of photos and movies on the iMac is 1.5TB. - Additionally there a MBPro and several iPads used to access files and edit documents. - All machines have direct attached storage for backup (time machine and CCC) GOAL: I am interested in having ability to share information more flexibly across devices, eg., access music/movie media from any device; access documents from any of the computers, and ideally play movies on ATV without requiring a Mac to be running iTunes. I realize cloud-based options can help with some of this, but the media files need high bandwidth and some of the documents have sensitive info I'd be nervous putting on a public server. I have tried plugging a USB disk into the Airport Extreme, but was not satisfied with the performance for streaming movies. Is a NAS the right solution to pursue or is there another solution I should consider? Suggestions will be most welcome.