Streaming Apple Lossless and H.264 video to FrontRow & i

[THMPub]

Apologies for the length / number of this question in advance…

Background:
I’m looking to set up a serious media server but before invest the time and money I’d like to get clarification on a few things. I’ve got a huge library (1.4Tb) of Apple Lossless (.m4a) and h.264 movies that I’d like to be able to stream over a gigabit network to FrontRow on a macmini hooked up to a TV and to a collection of reasonably current systems (mix mac & PC) running iTunes over 802.11g.

Q1:
Is the current stable release able to stream both file types? Have the issues with files downloading completely before playing / hanging instead of streaming been resolved? (Because of the library size transcoding is something I’d really rather not think about & waiting for some of the huge movies to download fully would be a downer)

Q2:
Does anyone have any experience with the streaming these higher bit rate formats? Dose the gigabit provide a functionally instant experience, is the 802.11g tolerable?

Q3:
Finally the SSH stream would be really cool but I can’t imagine streaming lossless over most broadband is all that workable. Does anyone have a good way to setup real time down converting to connections from the internet?

Thanks for the Help!!

[rpedde]

@THMPub wrote:

Is the current stable release able to stream both file types? Have the issues with files downloading completely before playing / hanging instead of streaming been resolved? (Because of the library size transcoding is something I’d really rather not think about & waiting for some of the huge movies to download fully would be a downer)

Haven’t tested it in a while. It worked for a while, but frontrow seems to be a fast moving target, and the front row with 10.5 doesn’t seem to play it at this point.

— Ron

[Author]

Posts