HP's MediaSmart works with Time Machine, iTunes

G4 Mac Mini
1.5TB Seagate HDD via USB
I have about 50 Movies (so far) and about 300 TV show episodes ripped from DVD (personal collection) using Handbrake. It is nice to turn on the AppleTV in the living room and just flip through all of our media. No screwing around with scratched discs, etc...

Don't Time Machine hard drives need to be formatted with HFSJ in order for them to work? In that case Windows users wouldn't be able to access them.

I run a Windows 2003 server that been hacked to run windows media player 11 and playon with 1.5 TB of hard drive space. This streams all of my music and movies and hulu.com to my xbox 360.

1tb external on Mac Mini that contains all music, films and pics. That gets sync'd to a 1tb TC, 2nd Mac Mini downstairs uses the TC directly for music and pics whilst films are copied across to an external 250gb external usb as the wireless signal varies due to distance and old house.

Switch between Frontrow and Plex for media centre activities, Plex autoupdates its libraries and have an automator script that keeps the local iTunes up to date.

TC is always and don't have to worry about people deleting content (thanks to the TC useless permission options) as source is on the external drive on 1st Mini.

"Do you have a home-spun backup and streaming solution?"

Wish I did. All I have is this crap HDD, 1.8" 60GB from an old laptop. I don't keep it plugged in since it takes up two USB ports and somehow slows my computer down. That lead to not plugging it in at all for 20 days now, and yesterday when I finally wanted to do it my mini broke. If it wasn't so damn sad I would laugh, because it's so ironic.

Well, since it was out of warranty I would have had to come up for it, but since it was "only" 30 days, Apple was so nice to come up for the broken logicboard, and I have to pay the repair. That's why I love Apple.

i hackintoshed my old pc after upgrading to a mbp, the hackintosh now lives in the corridor and serves as my livingroom media center, streaming music and video wirelessly from 4 drives attached to my time capsule...the hackintosh is attached (via looong cables) to my tv & stereo...to control the hackintosh i simply use the apple remote (remote buddy) and for listening to music only when i don't wannt to turn on the tv i use the remote iphone app, for setting up/managing i use remote desktop from my mbp or the remote buddy app on my iphone....i love it, it's surprisingly all working really great at the moment, surprisingly even with big .mkv's :)

That would be nice!

Apple TV, Airport Extreme, Linux box (used to be Mythbuntu, but I hate Myth and we never use it now that we have the ATV with 4 TB of storage that we use over AFP/SMB to our Macs, the ATV and the other random laptops and desktops lying around the house.

I just moved (like today), so we're looking at making a more elegant/streamline solution. I'd really like to just suck it up and do Sonos, but we need to get a new bedroom and living room TV first.

In Terminal:

$ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1


More detailed description that applies to all sorts of NAS systems is at http://www.readynas.com/?p=253

I followed it with my FreeNAS box and it's working great.

I've got something similar, with a Mac Mini acting as my server (and a 'netbook' of sorts for my wife, who only uses a computer about 5 minutes a day).

My main problem: Hilariously slow USB write speeds to my external drives (~1MB/second). I've poked around the internets and apparently I'm not the only one—and for many people, Firewire isn't any better. Has anyone else noticed that, and if so, what's the remedy?