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The G4-500dp has been replaced by an imac on my desk. Wahoo! So the G4 has been moved to a corner, sans monitor, to simply serve video and music to my two eyehome's. An sata card is on the way so I can replace the external 250gb drive with dual 250 sata internal drives.
Probably the most interesting part of this setup is how I got network access to the machine. I didn't want to run wire so I took a spare airport extreme base station and used it to extend my existing wireless network. Then an ethernet cable runs from the base station to the computer. It still picks up the correct ip address which my new airport base station specifies for that mac address. I played some music and a video this morning and it appeared to work flawlessly. As I use it more I'll report back.
Dave
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i have the same machine in essentially the same duty. i highly recommend setting retrospect or something similar.
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So this is basically a very large AppleTV ? Or am I missing something ?
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Alright, now you've got to explain how the machine serves data to the eyehome devices... Please!
Jeff
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The G4 is holding ALL of the video and sends it to the eyehome's as needed for playback (on demand). The advantage of this setup over the AppleTv is:
1) cost. My setup cost me a $50 sata card and some existing equipment. To duplicate I'd have to buy two appletv's at a price of $600.
2) flexibility. The Appletv's are pretty limited in what they can playback right now while the eyehome's can play back "just about" any drm free files. I have ton's of files the appletv could not currently playback.
3) bloat. I can't imagine loading hundreds of gigs of video into the itunes library. Backup would become difficult. It just doesn't make any sense to me to put video into the itunes library. The eyehome just shows whatever is in your movies folder.
I think I will eventually move to the appletv's but they will need to gain the ability to playback various file format's first. For now I'll keep getting my investment out of the eyehome (even though it has it's own warts).
Dave
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kj4btkljv, I have a brand new airport extreme which has three ethernet (lan) jacks on the back. Two run under the house to the eyehome's while the third runs to my new imac.
The media server (g4) is plugged into an older airport extreme's lan port which is configured to extend the existing wireless network. That way the g4 uses the same ip scheme as the rest of the network and I didn't have to run any wires to it. It also allows me to move the media server to whatever location it needs to be in.
So far the speed of the wireless appears to be adequate for serving up video but of course more time will reveal any flaws. I will be doing most of my downloading from the imac which is hard wired to the main base station so it won't create any wireless traffic, so I think this will work out.
Dave
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I only have two problems in using the eyehomes. One is that I cannot fast forward or reverse the video any longer. They did an update awhile back and now that feature no longer works. From reading eyehome forums it appears most people are just living without it. Two, sometimes the itunes library can't be read. I haven't figured this one out yet. Turning the eyehome on and off a few times, or restarting the eyehome application fixes the problem but it is annoying.
This is one reason I'm going with a dedicated machine for the eyehome's. I'm going to lock in the OS level and stop doing any upgrades on that computer so it will continue to work and not lose any further features.
Dave
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I have my MDD acting as the server but was forever having issues with the EyeHome software being corrupted, I'd install the latest and it wouldn't work right so I'd roll it back to 1.5 and after a few weeks it get corrupted again. Much like yourself I ended up relegating the MDD to server duty, but now I run the EyeHome from the iMac instead and not only is it running the latest upgrades it hasn't had any problems since I switched over. Try running the software from the iMac and it may solve some of your issues.
