One very complicated media network....
Alright, here goes. Long time reader, brand new member here at LQ. Thismis something I have been playing with for a very very long time and never managed to get just how I would like. I have a Mac Mini with an external hard drive containing 110,000 songs. The Mac Mini itself holds a whole lot of movies as well. Now the 110,000 songs are organizedin folders by artist, then album, then song, but are not contained in any sort of library like iTunes. The Mac Mini is running Lion, and it has SAMBA installed, running, and sharing. Now, the router used in my house is an Airport Extreme, which is also paired with an Airport Express, and some powerline ethernet adapters here and there. My goal was to be able to stream the contents of the Mac Mini and the hard drive to 3 computers in the house, a 2004ish Dimension 3000 running whatever distro I please (i constantly change), an Optiplex 740 running Mint KDE. These are both "powerlined." then there is a Macbook dual booting Ubuntu and Leopard, wireless to the Airport Express. These guys are essintially the clients to the Mac Mini running as a media server. Now I wouldnt be posting here if XBMC worked like i wanted, but it hasn't. It just hasn't been stable enough. It's really just too powerful for the Dimension and the 2004 Macbook. Basically, the main goal would be to use some media player to stream the music organzied in folders on the external hard drive to some media player without actually storing the 300+ GB onto the various computers. That's the man goal, but movies would be great too. Those just weren't happenng with XBMC. I feel like with 30+ mbps, my internet is plenty fast. Any suggestions for media players or extra streaming programs that don't use the total power of the older computers is greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
wemaxey
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