10 ATVs home-sharing 1 itunes library

I can not tell what you are asking? You really have 10 ATV's at your house? What for? Part of Apple's FairPlay DRM restrictions are that you can only only activate 5 devices for your account. That includes computers, iPads, iPhones, iPods, ATV's etc. So you will only be able to watch DRM content (mainly TV shows and movies) on five devices.

You need the apple-ID to activate home sharing (from iTunes), even if the content you are sharing does not have DRM (i.e. normal MP3 audio or MP4 video). It will ask when you enable iTunes as a server bascially.

Also, you need to pair the AppleTV with the iTunes Library you are sharing, so I guess (cannot try, don't have moer than 5 devices) this is where the limit of 5 devices comes into play.

1) 5 device limit

http://www.apple.com/itunes/inside-itunes/2012/04/share-your-itunes-library-with -others-by-using-home-sharing.html

... "sharing for each computer on the home WiFi network (up to five)" (the appleTV does count as once device)

2) password required to enable home sharing:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4352

If the content is not DRM'ed and is in an open format like MPEG, MP4, etc. then the limit of five devices does not come into play. You can only active 5 devices with iTunes, but I am not aware of a connection count limit for just home sharing. However home sharing is limited to your local network so this will probably not work. The differnt parts of your campus are probably on differnt subnets which would keep a home sharing connectoin from working. Additionally trying to source 10 diffenrt video streams from one iTunes instance concurrently will likely overwhelm the network connection and cause the video to be choppy, pause or hang. What you are trying to do is not what ATV is designed for. There are comerical grade products for that type of applicaiotn.

I see so much "speculation" on these Apple forums it makes my head spin sometimes!

Let me talk from personal experience...

We run SEVEN (7) 3rd generation AppleTVs at our business with no issue on a Mac Mini i7 server (16Gb) that also runs two virtual OS on them including Win Server 2008 and Win Server 2003. If you look at the bandwidth and memory usage the i7 is bearly taxed, ever. The 2nd and 3rd generation ATV have a 8Gb cache so once the content is "streamed" to the ATV there is no additional bandwidth usage. Chances are most homes, businesses or even schools are NOT going to be downloading the same large file at the same time...but even if they did chances are hour 100mbps or 1gbps network will take no issue with this. At worse there could be a HD bottle neck if you are running a 8 year old mac mini with 5400 drive, but I digress.

We use them to loop content in playlists...this works well but most of the wifi based ATVs will eventually get a hickup in the LAN that kicks the content off...so I've been slowly hardwiring the ATVs in the LAN for better stability.

Keep in mind the devices mentioned toward the "5" number are computers. I've never seen a limit in my house which consists of...

4 iphone

4 ipads

4 ATV

3 OSX systems

All are on the same iTunes/home sharing account.

Lastly, the 5 limit was true for the first generation AppleTVs that show up in your iTunes preferences under the Apple TV tab...any more then 5 and we had to run a virtual OSX system to handle the 6th and 7th system. I noted that the first generation units were getting harder and harder to keep talking to iTunes so we upgraded to the 3rd generations. Proof of concept says it works.

Apple only has one small bug in the matter for our need...on the ATV the "repeat music" should read as "repeat playlist" and the REMOTE app for ipad/iphone turns off the "repeat music" functionality on the ATV so any playlisted selected doesn't loop if changes are made from the REMOTE app.

Brian Cook4 wrote:

Part of Apple's FairPlay DRM restrictions are that you can only only activate 5 devices for your account. That includes computers, iPads, iPhones, iPods, ATV's etc.

No it doesn't, rather they don't count.

5 Computers.

See:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH1730

meire wrote:

Hi,

Is anyone had such experience ?

10 ATV3 doing home sharing to the same Itunes Library . the appleID on ATV inserted on home sharing ' not in itunes account .

Is home sharing acts like Itunes store - 5 computers limit ? Is ATV considers as computer at all?

Thanks,

There seems to be a 5 ATV limit per iTunes library.

I suspect this relates more to potential bandwidth issues trying to stream to more but who knows.

AC

I am sorry to necro post but I have been searching the internet for the past few days about max device limits and bla bla bla...it makes me so angry trying to figure out manufacture specifications that are not posted anywhere. This is not rocket science, this is just some number Apple picked out of thin Air and can choose to enforce in their software or not. I got off the phone with apple senior tech support and it was hard getting through to them my question but eventually we got on the same level. They say 5. 5 Apple TV's will work at once.

I cannot find anything to support this either way, more or less and I find so many different answers everywhere.

What I need to know can be answered I think by

quitsayingmetoo

and I am hoping that that user or even someone else reply's with real world experience with the number of Apple TV devices and their generations that they successfully have streamed at once through HOME SHARING FROM ITUNES.

This is exactly that quitsayingmetoo is describing. Local Video Files on a Local Network home-shared AND all playing at once.

Apple gives us the home sharing limit of 5 devices but has anyone recently done simultaneous video loops with more then 5?

Also if you have real world server data (iTuens Server, etc) and not some copy and paste from the internet which may or may not be right because Apple is so very confusing across generations and devices can you post it?

I need to know if the apple software allows me to take 7 Apple TV devices, point them to iTunes home sharing and then hit loop/play ALL AT ONCE.

I can handle testing of network bandwidth, system specifications, etc.

As I mentioned before we could ONLY get 5 ATVs to talk to Home Sharing via iTunes...adding the 6th ATV and you simply couldn't get it to work, no message. We had a mix of ATV1, ATV2 and ATV3 with the ATV2 and ATV3 being the primary units we worked with. At our max we had 9 ATVs in product and it basically required 3 unique instances of iTunes running to make them work effectively. If there any hiccup in the network the ATVs would be kicked off and we'd have to get them back on again.

Thanks for the most excellent response. I ended up talking to Apple again after my last forum post and this time I was told "Unlimited."

I missed the fact that you were using virtualization to get past the limit. This is what I plan to do now.

Why did you require 3 virtualized instances if you only had 9 devices? Would not two work just fine?

My current plan is to get a system, virtualize X amount of instances of Windows 7 on it and dedicate a full gigabit NIC to each instance. I was also thinking about VLANing off the AppleTV devices.

But I figured I would only need 2 instances for 10 devices.

Thanks for your help so far.

I had to run the 3rd because on some days it jus seems like I couldn't get the 5th unit to connect!

It for some reason one of the ATV units lost connection with the server it sometimes wouldn't connect again...often if it was the 5th. I would use the 3rd server as my backup. Otherwise I would often have to reboot the iTunes server which means more ATV would get knocked off and then sometimes they would not reconnect and I would have to reboot the ATV then. It's all really delicate in our production environment.

Sometimes the ATVs were 3 or 4 switch jumps from the server. I gave up on WIFI and also hardwired all the ATVs.

After two or three seasons (we are a ski resort) I gave up and started buying Intel NUCs and using Risevision for our media needs.

It's a good solution for a small business trying to run 2, 3 or maybe 4 ATVS...much beyond that it was a pain to admin.