Home network problem

Hello,

I currently have the following home set-up:

XP machine- which stores all my media- itunes playlists, photos and videos.
Mac Powerbook
Mac Mini- as media receiver in living room.

The issue i am having is getting the mac mini to recognise all the shared media on the PC. I have got it to sync with iTunes. But i cannot get it to find all the photos. Also, when it does play movies from the 'shared video' section, it takes an age to bring up the directory of movies.

Any help would be much appreciated, I am a mac fan but a novice!

Regards
W

I hope you do realize the comedy here,....

My first suggestion would be to get an external HD for the mini and move all the media as it would save you many trips to the pharmacy for Excedrin.

Sharing files across a network is one thing, trying to play large movie files across the network is another. Even mac to mac you will most likely have buffer problems here and there.

LaCie makes those nifty little HD's that look just like the Mini, and they are stackable.

Maybe not what you wanted to hear, but the end result will be better.

you are right, not what i wanted to hear! I have 3 macs all trying to access the same files! Do you think a NAS drive on my ethernet network will improve matters?

NAS is great for storing large amounts of data for multiple users. It still will give you buffer problems trying to playback large movies across a network.

If any of this data is important to you, I would think of a backup strategy before I made any purchases. But if you were thinking getting a NAS, an externel HD for the Mini would be cheaper and would solve the movie buffering. If you have plenty of room on the XP machine you could backup to that using NTBackup.

Thank you for all help so far. It really is appreciated.

My problem still remains that i have a mac mini in my cinema room and one in my living room and xp in study. I would like to play movies in my cinema room and living room from the same collection.

Any ideas at all on how i can do this? I am a novice, but a 100Mbit ethernet and a network drive should surely be enough to play mobies?

Regards,
Wasim

Well,...

It sounds like you already have things set up to do what you want. Your biggest problem is the time it takes to view the contents of a shared folder.

Can you play a movie???

Move a movie to a Mac and play it from the other Mac. Does it play?