Airport Extreme/AirDisk Apple TV - Not streaming...

Hi Alan,

I was planning on buying an TV and do exactly the same, access a hard drive -400 GB Seagate- connected via USB to an Airport Extreme (N).

Please keep us posted about your experience.

Thanks in advance.

f.

MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo

Hmm, this is NOT good news. I was gonna do the same thing with my Extreme's Airdisk.

Some things I can think to try:

-Did you open up iTunes while holding the Option button & choose the external's iTunes library? Did you also change the setting inside the iTunes Preferences/Advanced tab??

-Did you copy the "iTunes" folder onto your external drive & not the "iTunes Music" folder??

-Did you erase the iTunes library on your Mac??

Please let us know what you find out because im not buying one if I cant do this.

HAS ANYONE HAS THIS PROBLEM. My Apple TV won't play any protected content and the apple service rep. literally hung up on me after tellling me that maybe in 5-10 days engineering MIGHT want to see the unit. I asked why they just won't replace. Anyone heard of this before?

Alan just called me and we spent 30 minutes brainstorming about this, so I simply must try to put up the stuff we came up with 🙂

Firstly, I only own a Mac Mini and an Airport Express. I am relatively new to the Mac community (although have been a huge fan and have followed the tech side of it for a long time), but here's what we came up with.

In a nutshell, it is round-tripping from the hard drive, to the laptop, back to the airport, and then to the AppleTV. How'd we come up with this? Stop me at any point if I'm wrong... assumptions:

- Airdisk uses samba to share the hard drive over the network with any Mac connected to that network.
- Airdisk is available to any mac that is properly configured through regular IP (say, it's a samba share that's located on the IP of the router - your mac is already connected to the router, so it connects to the drive at router_ip/sambashare)

So at any point further, the Airdisk is just a dumb file server located on the Airport Extreme that serves up USB drive contents (I don't mean "dumb" in a derogatory sense, more than it was designed to do the least possible, for efficiency, such as a dumb terminal).

The AppleTV, however, finds "sources" as other iTunes libraries. Judging by Apple's previous implementations for such things, they are using Bonjour (aka Rendezvous, aka multicast DNS Service Discovery), to discover basically iTunes libraries (using the same discovery suffix that iTunes uses to find other iTunes instances on the network, say ".itunes.local").

So since the hard drive is not advertised as an iTunes library, it won't be directly found. Instead, AppleTV finds the iTunes that's running on your laptop. It starts streaming content from that iTunes library (again, from your laptop). Your laptop in turn needs to collect the content before sending it over to AppleTV. It does this, again, over the network using Airdisk.

So essentially, you have a packet follow this path:

AppleTV requests for content from laptop (packet travels through Airport extreme to laptop)
Laptop requests for data from Airdisk (packet travels from laptop to Airport)
Laptop receives data from Airdisk (packet travels from Airport Extreme to laptop)
Laptop sends received data to Apple TV (packet travels to Airport Extreme, and then to the Apple TV)

So essentially, while you are streaming a movie with a lot of content, the packet is going roundabout to the airport extreme, and then to the apple TV, instead of going directly from the AE to the ATV.

Does that make sense? Essentially, there's all this roundabout overhead for the packet to travel.

I could TOTALLY be wrong. I would love it if Apple chimed in and proved this theory wrong 🙂

But I think this is ok because the functionality to make the AppleTV stream directly from Airdisk is easy to add, by just patching the software. All you'd need to do is have samba shares as possible sources, instead of just other iTunes instances. You'd still be getting stuff from an IP address. You'd just change the protocol.

Anyway, I hope this didn't get too convoluted. I'd get Alan to make up a picture. He's the graphic designer. I'm just a gearhead. 🙂 (Used to be "PC Guy" turned Mac guy the moment I found out OS X had a Unix underbelly 5 years ago)

Intel Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.9) Airport Express

So essentially, you have a packet follow this path:

AppleTV requests for content from laptop (packet
travels through Airport extreme to laptop)
Laptop requests for data from Airdisk (packet travels
from laptop to Airport)
Laptop receives data from Airdisk (packet travels
from Airport Extreme to laptop)
Laptop sends received data to Apple TV (packet
travels to Airport Extreme, and then to the Apple
TV)

So essentially, while you are streaming a movie with
a lot of content, the packet is going roundabout to
the airport extreme, and then to the apple TV,
instead of going directly from the AE to the ATV.

Does that make sense? Essentially, there's all this
roundabout overhead for the packet to travel.

That sounds about right. I imagine this would be hard to do on a wireless G network, but doable on a wireless all N network.

Shame the AppleTV cant just see the Airdisk iTunes library directly. You would think Apple would have foreseen this scenario.

I totally understand that it's doable on an N network. But it just shouldn't be done that way. I can understand if you're running a hybrid set of products (like a linksys router, etc).

But we're talking about a homogenous Apple environment. They can still implement standard protocols, and innovatively have the AppleTV automatically detect the Airdisk. I don't see why not.

Hopefully they will do this as a patch.

Did they have you try deauthorizing your computer, playing one of the iTunes songs, entering your Apple ID and password, and then resync the TV?

i don't think that tha apple TV operates on a disc level... it does not mount drives and read directories directly, but communicates to iTunes via TCP/IP as a sharing service... a sort of client or extension to iTunes. the reality is that a disk attached via USB to a router's storage server is really not the best way to go about a setup that you have the luxury of planning out. it is a feature of the AEBS but not necessarily the recommended method of attached high availability content. if you do not want to have DAS (direct attached storage) to you iTunes host - i.e. maintain a file server, either implicitely or via function, the next best thing would be to keep you media on a NAS (network attached storage) that is a 24/7 AFP sharepoint for your iTunes host when available (if your host is a laptop for example) or to serve to other iTunes hosts... but in any circumstance, the Apple TV is totally dependent on your iTunes host(s) and not the storage point for coordination of synched or streamed content.

it should work, though, just not very fast... it would not suprise me if the USB attached "airdisk" is not reliable - as it is not a very robust method.

Hmmm, it might have been an error that I discovered in my AirDisk utility.

Sometimes, when you mount & unmount your Airdisk, the Airdisk Utility doesnt see your available external Airdisk drive in the menu bar. Even though its still attached to the APE base station.

I found that if you open the Airport Disk Utility & click then unclick the "Automatically Discover AP Disks", then the AirDisk Utility in the menu bar will see your external drive again.

But, thats just a guess really.

I also have the setup

Macbook <--> Airport with Airdisk <--> AppleTV

with the iTunes library on the Airdisk,

and it's working (finally). What I needed to do to get it working (there were a couple of reboots too):

1) For INITIAL sync with the ATV, disconnect the Airdisk from the Airport, plug it directly into the Mac, point iTunes at it if necessary, then sync to the ATV.

2) Quit iTunes, eject the disk, reconnect it to the Airport. Relaunch iTunes, point it back to the Airdisk.

The AppleTV is now happily synced, and I can also stream (both of which, yes, appear to involve 3 legs on the network, but at 802.11n speed, works fine - we'll see how it works once real HD content is involved). It does tend to bog down if you try to hit the Airdisk with too much at once, but that's a general problem with the shockingly slow speed of Airdisk that I have to hope an Airport software update is going to fix.

(To give an example, I tried streaming a South Park from iTMS from the Macbook over to the AppleTV. There was about a 2 second buffer lag, and then it played perfectly smoothly.)

MacBook C2D Mac OS X (10.4.9)

MacBook C2D Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Im sure the type of external drive you have as your Airdisk would play a role in speed as well. Is it a SATA drive??