Apple TV, run 2 things?

rut_bwoy · Jun 8, 2011

Hello guys, i have a slightly weird question ...

If i have 1 mac ... and 2 apple TV's in the house ... can i access 2 different things simultaneously from my itunes ... for example 2 different movies.

And how about adding airport express could i do that while watching a movie?

Thanks.

Sam

rut_bwoy · Jun 10, 2011

Anyone?

osxx · Jun 10, 2011

You can add an Airport Express to any Mac for streaming music and remote printer amongst various other things not sure about accessing movies at the same time but
a lot of guys on AVS Forums have an Apple TV for each TV in their house.

rut_bwoy · Jun 11, 2011

I wanted to know if i could do 2 things at the same time :/

iHarrison · Jun 11, 2011

rut_bwoy said:
I wanted to know if i could do 2 things at the same time :/

Erm... So long as your home network has the capacity to carry two full video streams at once, I can't see why your Mac couldn't talk to both ATVs at the same time...

If you want to get technical about how it would do it; it would "interplex" the streams - i.e. send part of the stream to ATV 1 for a millisecond or so, then send part of the stream to ATV 2 for a millisecond, then swap back & so-on & so-forth... All the time both ATVs would be buffering the streams in their internal memories, and so you'd just get two smooth, continuous outputs to your televisions.

baggss · Jun 11, 2011

I just tried this for grins and yes, it will work just fine.

I will caveat that I have a new Airport Extreme (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz dual band) and that all the devices involved were running on the 5Ghz 802.11N side of the network. I will also add that one ATV was on the wireless and the other ATV was on the wired side of the network, but both were streaming from iTunes on my iMac.

rut_bwoy · Jun 16, 2011

Wooo thanks alot baggss

RoPearl2003 · Jun 26, 2011

As a matter of more info on this issue...

I discovered I can actually watch 3 separate movies from the same iTunes account on 3 separate TV's with 3 separate ATV's. Discovered purely by accident (I don't watch 3 movies at a time myself) but it works.

baggss · Jun 26, 2011

RoPearl2003 said:
As a matter of more info on this issue...

I discovered I can actually watch 3 separate movies from the same iTunes account on 3 separate TV's with 3 separate ATV's. Discovered purely by accident (I don't watch 3 movies at a time myself) but it works.

I suspect the only limiting factors here would be the ability of your Mac to handle the video being played and the speed of your network between devices.

RoPearl2003 · Jun 26, 2011

I read somewhere (and now of course I can't remember where) that the limiting number of simultaneous streams was 4 from the same iTunes account, but I can't verify that or say its absolute

rut_bwoy · Jun 26, 2011

WOW you guys are amazing.

Thanks