Mac Mini, Synology, Apple TV, iTunes - where to start

I have a similar setup which uses:

A minimac server

A ds213 synology disk station 2 x 4TB mirrored

A netgear NAS offsite

2 x mac book pro's

A number of Window 7 laptops

2 Apple TV attracted to TVs

4 iPads

3 iPhones

A draytek router / switch

A hard wired cat 6 network.

I played around with a number of combinations but have it all working now.

1) all my movies, home video, photos and music are on the Synology NAS the music is in an iTunes library

2) I run Plex on my minimac server which has the processing power to transcode video and stream it to any device.

3) I run iTunes on my minimac with it's library on the synology box

4) I have jail broken my 2 apple TVs and installed Plex

It all works perfectly the only downside is needing 2 client apps on each device one for music and one for movies. Once Plex allows the creation of playlists I think I'll scrap iTunes all together

Oh I back up thw synology box to an offsite NAS over the Internet. Plex also allows access to movies over the Internet so is effectively a cloud server.

The only think I needed network wise was a decent switch as I found before I bought the Draytec if more than 3 people were watching movies the whole system stopped functioning

3) where to manage the media, this for me is where the synology comes in, I personally don't like iTunes 'managing' and 'organising' everything for me. I like to know what I have, where it is, how it's tagged and importantly want the choice to move away from iTunes at a later stage if I want to or share my media through other means at the same time.

So what I do is have a number of media shares on the synology music, movies, home videos, pictures, tv. I can shares there via upnp, DNLA. I also point a iTunes instance running on a mac mini at the same shares but I don't pull the data into the iTunes library. This gives you the full iTunes capability of streaming to other apple devices, syncing iPads etc. I have also moved the iTunes library (the actual database, album art, playlists etc) to another shared on the synology called iTunes funny enough. There are forums on how to do this but if anyone is interested I can post something.

So this way the mac mini is just a presentation device with no data on at all. So you can replace without having to find and move your data. Also another good point on this is that you can have more than one iTunes server using the same media and iTunes library/database. So instantly you get the exact same iTunes library, playlists, album art etc. on more than one iTunes server. Any updates you do appear on the others. There are some gotchas with this though. Firstly all the itunes servers need to see the same media shares. You can't edit manage the iTunes on more than one machine at a time you have to close the others while you make changes on one, once you make the changes you can then reopen the others. I have also experienced issues with doing this method between macs and pcs, I think because the sharing path for the media between macs and pcs look slightly different so when I try to use on a pc it looses the media, but I will look at this at some point.

but how?

Message was edited by: doh forgot to paste this in

Figured I would throw in my two cents. First my setup

• Synology 1511+ fully loaded with 6 3tb drives
• Headless Mac mini in the equipment rack
• 3 various Mac laptops in the house
• ipads, iphones
• the mini and the NAS are connected to the network via an unmanged switch in the rack

1. A few of you mentioned running iPhoto from your Synology NAS. I would be curious to here how this worked out. I had no luck getting this to work. My understanding is that the iPhoto Library file needs to be on an Apple formatted drive.

2. I use the Mac mini as a very expensive media server. I had an old imac but the drive implouded, and I needed a fix. I figured having the mini hardwired to the network (as is the ATV) would give me much better performance - it did.

3. For managing the mini i tried various ways of remoting in, and found the best solution for me was an app call iTeleport available from the App Store (there are iOS versions available as well).

4. I used to keep the itunes library on the NAS. This is a disaster and I would strongly recommend against this. If the NAS goes to sleep - your mac loses its connection, and then you have to deal with various "itunes library cannot be found" messages. Imagine having to constantly remote into the mac and reconnencting to the NAS, and then repointing the itunes library to its location on the NAS. Not fun

5. ataylor2012 hit the nail on the head when he talked about iTunes being the choke point. I have a very large media library - 40,000+ songs, hundreds of movies and TV shows. Much of the video was purchased from Apple - so I am stuck with iTunes. I recently needed to add a 6th and final drive to my NAS. Since it had been a while since I added a drive, i couldn't remember how to remove the plate that acts as a place holded. Not thinking I accidently ejected one of the disks. This is when all my troubles began. At first I wasn't to concerned. I am a software guy, and I have seen plenty of demos where a live drive is pulled out of a NAS and put right back in. I put the drive back in, and the Sysnology didn't know what to do. 24 hours later, the Synology finally had the recognized the old drive, and properly formatted and configured the system for the new drive. I immediately noticed that my iTunes library was corrupt, and that songs and videos where missing. It took me several days of mucking around to finally get things rebuilt. Unfortuantely, I have definitely lost some music. Luckily I was able to redownload all the video i lost from the Apple Store Cloud. But...you knew there would be a but...I lost all my playcounts, I lost all of my history, and my idevices all had to be rebuilt since the itunes library was destroyed, and the devices where all "connected to a diffferent" itunes library.

Overall, I am generally not satisfied with the NAS. It seems to me that Apple products really work the best when they are working and communicating with other Apple products (or similiarly formatted devices). I aam looking pretty hard at the "Promise Pegasus" solutions on the Apple Store. My Mini has a thunderbolt port, and so I have to believe that will work better. Right now, with a recent upgrade to itunes, my mini is back to saving new videos on its local hard drive, and I am too (lazy nervous scared) to muck around with it to get those files on to the NAS. Like I said earlier I am a software guy not a hardware guy, but it just shouldn't be this complicated. It is 100% entirely possible that i simply misconfigured or am misusing the NAS somehow, but for me it all boils down to

• pulling the drive was a bone head move by me, but that was ground zero for all my problems
• not getting iPhoto to run on the NAS was a let down - but as it turns out only 1 computer at a time can connect to the iPhoto library anyway, so in the long run it wouldn't have mattered - why oh why Apple do I have to use your proprietary file format for managing my photos?!?!?!?
• never never never store the itunes library on the NAS
• I feel that Apple likes to talk Apple, and adding a new format into the mix complicates life

I've finally achieved a stable media server set-up using a Synology DS213 (3TB) and a Mini Mac Server - it now all works a treat.

This is the set-up:

Synology DS213

Hosts all my media including my iTunes library, movies, home movies, audio books etc

Has a pctv T2 Nano Stick

I have DVB-Link running on the NAS which allows me to record TV (including HD TV) to .ts files. I also have Logitec Media Server running on the NAS.

MiniMac Server I7 Processor, 8GB RAM running Mountain Lion Server (this host all my family personal files).

On the MiniMac I'm Running iTunes and Plex Media Server. I initially had Plex Media Server running on the Synology box but DS213 doesn't have the power to enable Plex to transcode so I having decided I coud live without iTunes I decided to run PMS on the Mac as well.

Apple TV

I have and ATV connected to my samsung smart TV and I use this with iTunes for music and it also connects to my Amplifier and speakers - the music quality is excellent. My wife likes the ATV interface for music and making playlists from the remote control app on her iPAD

Samsung Smart TV

This use the Plex app and plays movies and recored TV excellently in HD

Daughters TV and ROKU media streamer

The Roku steams TV and music in 720p very well using the Plex App

iPhones and iPads

Uses the Plex App for movies, recorded tv and music etc with the iTunes Music Channel for play lists.

The house is wired with Cat 6 cable and I have a DrayTek Router / Gigabit Switch and a T-Link 8 Gigabit Manged Switch. I have set these up to priorites the media streams over all other traffic (except vioce over ip).

As an experiment I played and HD recorded TV show on the smart TV, a different movie on my daughters and two more different movies on iPad - they all played perfectly. The only remaining problem i have is for some reason i can't play recoreded TV shows on my iPhone 4 if they are over 2 hours long (no idea why because they play fine on everything else). I would also like to be able to stream live TV to iPads and iPhones using Plex but there isn't an avialable plug-in to do this.

Power consumption wise when not in use the system is using about 27 watts and in use it rises to over 55 watts We have solar power which reduces the running costs but without it i quess it would cost about a maximum of £60 a year to run.

Hello,

Just been reading this thread and have encouted the same issues as most. I would like to mention my work around which i found to be a simple amd effective way to sort out the iTunes library syncing on multiple macs.

I used a handy app called Chronosync, you install this on each machine and then choose the main itunes "host .xml file to be synced with the other mac on you network. By doing this it updates itunes and then the music you riped on the "Master Mac" will appear on the others. You can set it up to automate once you have it working.

You can also set it up to update both Macs if you are adding files away from home and so on.

Anyhow after much googling i found this to be a simple and effective method to sort the iTunes delema.

Its not 100% automated but really what is. I just thought i would mention it on this thread as i may save others time and frustration.

On another note i pretty sure most are aware that you need to make sure your NAS or Server that you host your files on has enough grunt to serve them and that your Network infrastructure is more than adequate to handel the traffice or the whole thing goes to crap. With the hidef 720p and 1080p rips coming up on the web and Apple lossless music its easy to hammer your network with just 3 or 4 clients.

And finally, i just setup an ATV for a mate.. and well i just would not work over the wifi loss of sync and other issueswith airplay, anyhow hocked it up via Airport Base station ex Gigabit and that sorted out most if not all the querks. I then installed Plex Client and had no issues streaming 1080p 10GB titles all of which looked great and full DTS 5.1 etc From an iMac in the Study, shouuld also mentin for those of you with the same setup, or intended setup, in the plex preference on the ATV set Plex server to do all the Decoding and make sure to set the local network part to 10Gb per second for real HD.

Made several comparions bettrween the iMac handeling the decoding VS the streaming option where the ATV decodes it and i got to say with the fullHD 1080P 5 to 10GB files the imac did a signifigantly better job of the decoding and the end result was a clear vivd glass like image that you weould expect from Bluray as the ATV hardware decding was chopy with a lot of overtones and shadow like distorion.

In short the i7 iMac killed it.

So the moral of the story is WIFI still ***** and CAT 6 Gigabit sorts out all the Querks and i7 smashed the ATV for quality and performance ... obviously.

PS: My first reply was pulled down by Apple moderator because i made reference to the unthinkable modifiactions that some people choose to perform on the beloved Apple TV.

If Apple refined there existing services to be more complete regarding what obviosly a large portinon of the technology community want then all of that could be avoided.

OK rant over, besides that Check out Chronosysnc its great, and has anyone actually got iTunes Match to work from start to finish. Been at it or a few days and due the the automation of the process it just seems to fail.

Okay so after playing a bit further with all the gear I have now more or less retired my MacMini!!!

It turns out that the Media Server on the Synology is actually quiet good. After setting it up I could see that media server from more devices in my house and play more content than with any media server I installed on my MacMini (i have tried several but mainly Playback and Plex).

Now the only issue with using the Synology box is that it can't do iTunes probably for the ATVs. However the ATVs can easily play any content from any Mac in the house that's setup via Home Sharing. So instead of having to move my iTunes library to the MacMini to stream it I can just stream it straight from any Mac in the house anyway to the ATVs. So this is not so much an issue at all, in some sense simply things as it's one less copy.

What I am doing now is have all my Apple purchase content like Music and Movies in my iTunes library sitting on vairous Macs in the house and play that on my TV via the ATV. For non-Apple content that is not in iTunes I have setup a Media Server on the Synology box and can stream that through my XBOXs to the TV.

I think that's the setup I go with as it also has the advantage of separating the content of the purchased Apple stuff versus the other stuff.

So now my MacMini is idleing away and nothing is really running on it. I'll keep it around for a while and see if there is anything I can do with it but at the moment I don't see what I'd be using it for. If i dont' find anything I'll get rid of it - one less sytem to manage!

BTW I found it so much easier to have the Synology box as a file server as it has a web interface if you need to make any changes. With the MacMini as file server it works too but if you have to change something you need to do a remote session from a Mac to it and then drill down in desktop to what you want. The Synology web interface allows me to do this more straight forward from any system in the house as it's browser based. Even some things from iOS devices!

It's correct that a OS X system needs to be awake to stream iTunes contents, specifically for Home Sharing. So you can either have an iMac, Macbook or Mac Mini doing this. Yes sometimes my iMac goes to sleep - it's not too hard for me to walk over in the study and hit the keyboard to wake it up. Done! That's versus having an Mac Mini running 24x7 just for when you want to stream content - a bit a waste of trees.

Note once more here that the NAS box can stream non-iTunes content directly to a DLNA enabled device. Many TVs and DVD/Blueray players or game consol can stream that content. No need to have anything Apple.

Keep in mind that if you connect your Mac Mini directly to your TV you don't have the "nice interface" of an ATV. Since Lion Apple discontinued Frontrow so you have to deal with the standard OS X interface or install something like XBMC or Plex which in turn cannot stream iTunes content once more.

So here again what I do today maybe this makes more sense:

1) Non-iTunes content on Synology box -> Synology DLNA Server -> XBOX360 -> TV

2) iTunes content on Synology box -> Mount via Network share to iMac -> iTunes on iMac -> ATV -> TV

As previously pointed out in this threat you can also mix and match the non-iTunes and iTunes content in this way back on your Synology box if that's what you want to do.

Re the server version I bought this too but i have found that it was easier for me to go to each Mac in my house and just do what I want to do instead of trying to figure out how to configure a server to do things for me. I can see how in an environemnt where you can't get to each machine physically it has a lot of merit but if you can just walk in the next room and do it you are probably faster, except if you are a OS X Server guru.

I end up turning off the iTunes server on my Synology box and simply using it to host the iTunes Library as i didn't find it's possible to "re-share" content from an from an iTunes server (i played around for ages but couldn't find a way of resharing content). Sadley Apple TV does not support iTunes servers.

This wasn't really what I wanted so eventually I gave-up on iTunes and have installed Plex Server on my Synology box, and on my iPads and iPhones, I also jailbroke my Apple TV's and installed Plex on them now everything works perfectly and I don't have to run a PC or Mac as a server.

There are a couple of downsides to this approuch.

1) Currently Plex doesn't support playlists (but you can make them with iTunes)

2) I don't think your Synology Box will support transcoding (mine is a DS213 and it doesn't) but this should be an issue providing your video files are in the appropriate format for Apple devices.

Overall Plex is a nice media player and I prefer it to iTunes.

Yep Plex runs on well on Samsung smart TV - though it only works for Movies not music - as far as I can figure out. The other problem with Plex server on the NAS is unless you have a top end Synology NAS there isn't enough processor power to do the transcoding of movies. I have soved this by having my Plex library on my NAS and the server running on a mini-mac server.

As for Apple TV I used to really rate them and they still are brilliant if you want to play games on an iPad, Mac or iPhone on TV. But the restrictive nature of iTunes isn't - for a while I used my mini-mac as an itunes server for music but am now experimenting with Plex for everything and using the Plex client on a cheap and chearfull $50 ROKU LT Media Streamer for music. I have split the HDMI output with audio to my amplifier and video to the TV and so far so good - I can play music. I could use the device for both music and movies but Plex client on Samsung seems to handle full HD movies but the ROKU doesn't and the picture seems better on the Samsung Plex client.

None of this is as streamlined as I'd like but it all works and short of buying a top end synology NAS i'm pretty happy and have none of the restrictions of iTunes.

My only complaint is the inability to make playlists directly on Plex but I'll keep the apple TV's for games playing

I have all three devices and here is my opinion:

ATV - this is a no brainer and I'd recommend you get one or even more. I personally have two for the two TV's in my house and they are used to stream "Apple" content (anything that is in iTunes) to the TVs. Works perfect!

Mac Mini - i have and tried to use as central storage and media hub. Storage was always a challenge as USB and FW disks are slow and many cables, Thundrbolt disk to expensive. In terms of configuration you can remotely connect via Screen Sharing but it's not really designed to be remote administrered so sometimes challenging to change setting if you connect from a smaller screen, eg a Macbook. I have also found that this is running a "desktop OS X" that is not really designed to be a media hub or file server. You need to install an configure other software such as Plex or XBMC to make it work and that does not always go smoothly.

Synology - has all the storage you need and is setup to be a NAS that's per default remotely administrated. The web interface of the Synology box is the best I have seen. It has build in music, video and music servers that allow you to stream content to DLNA compatible devices. The only catch is that it doesn't have a proper iTunes server running like you can on a OS X system. The iTunes server it has is limited and doesn't allow you to do Home Sharing or Music Match etc. It just shows as a shared library on your network.

The only reason you need a Mac Mini on top of a Synology is if you don't have other OS X computers to stream the iTunes content. if you have other systems, eg iMacs they are able to stream the content through tem to your ATV than Synology box is really all you need.

I'd like to throw my situartion into the fray...

The heart of my system is a old Mac Mini and two Synology NAS (a 209 and a 212j) My 209 has two 1TB drives, my 212 has 2 2TB drive, each raid 5ed.

My 209 is my backup, music and photo, home movie NAS, my 212 is my movie (DVD) NAS.

I have an old 2008 Mac Mini (ebay purchase that you can get for < $200) that houses all my movies and home movies.

I have 3 ATVs, Mac Book, Mac Book Pro, iPad and 2 iPhones that can access and stream my movies and home movies to any TV or device in the house, as they are all on the shared Mac Mini. This works well for everyone to watch any movie or anything else anywhere in the house.. Only problem I have is I have too many movies and home movies to sift through. I want to be able to place them in different accounts or libaries to help seperate the various types. I wish I could run multiple iTunes account on the mac mini, but dont think thats possible.

So, my only issue is I wish I could have multiple 'share' sources to allow a filtering of movies and home movies to make viewing things on my ATVs (my primary viewing source) easier

Great thread.

ataylor definitely hits the nail on the head with iTunes being the choke point. It doesn't play ball particularly well with NAS devices, and I suspect thats probably deliberate from apple.

I've got my movies on a Synology NAS, use a plex server running on it, and watch using plex on my Samsung tv. Movies are encoded to avoid needing transcoded. Plex is great on other devices (iPad), though it seems to me the Samsung implementation of the interface is currently a little poorer and clunkier to use.

For my other non smart TVs I'd like to use an apple tv, and of course this is where the problems start. It sounds like the best workable solution is to add my movies to my iTunes library on a mac, though keeping the media in the original place. Not great but I'll give it a whirl.

I dont think there's currently a particularly good solution to this. Ideally one of the following would happen (and here comes the wishes as none are possible today, to the best of my knowledge)

If the Synology iTunes server was upgraded to work with movies and apple tv's

Or if the apple tv could read media from nas without needing iTunes (though lets face it, that's never going to happen)

Or if Plex could run on the Apple TV

Quite why apple think people want to store all their movies on one device is beyond me, or stream everything from the cloud. Bandwidth limits alone make this infeasible. Your NAS should be your local cloud, and movie streaming from it to apple devices should not be as hard as it is currently.