I’ve been meaning to document my home media setup for a while now because, well, I think it’s pretty sweet and I very much enjoy the setup literally every day. Before I go into the details of how everything works, here are the key benefits of this setup:

• I can watch 3TB worth of content (202 movies and 99 TV seasons at the moment) anytime I want at home. I don’t have to get up and put anything in or out, it’s just all always available. The data is protected against any single drive failure.

• The computers are set up to backup over Wi-Fi without me having to even think about it

• The computers can play music on the Bose speakers by taking over the Apple TV’s speaker output (this is an iTunes feature)

• In addition to playing games, I can use the XBox 360 for DVDs and to stream instantly from Netflix
• I can remote control the Apple TV with my iPhone! (via the excellent Remote app)

A couple of years ago I noticed that some of my old DVDs were no longer playing properly simply due to the disks aging, and a number of others had scratches and dents that made them glitchy. I looked around for good digital solutions, and the Apple TV caught my eye. The main problem for me was its hard-drive limitation, which at the time was around 140gigs. Given that I had a DVD library of well over 300 titles (I didn’t convert them all), there was no way that was going to cut it.

I was also getting to the point where I could no longer take commercial interruptions to the shows I love to watch, and I was determined to try to do something about it.

I started looking around for good storage solutions, and after a lot of time spent researching, I settled on the Drobo. It’s incredibly easy to set up and use, it protects you against any one of the hard-drives failing, and it’s easy to expand the capacity later on. Of course the challenge was making the Apple TV use an external source for its data while still allowing me to easily manage the whole thing.

Thankfully, the Apple TV lets you define an external iTunes instance as its main library as long as it is connected to the same network. I also knew that I wanted to have a robust solution to back up the important data on the various computers that my fiancee and I own. That’s where the Mac Mini comes in, which serves mainly as an iTunes library but also as a sharing point for the Maxtor drive (backup) and Drobo (media) to the network.

Here is what each node does:

Drobo:

The Drobo has four 1TB hard-drives. Internally they are setup as a RAID 5, which means that each drive is backed up by the other three, and therefore any one of them can fail without losing any data. If one does (it’s happened once already), just replace it and the data is internally re-laid out. This means that you get 3TB usable out of the 4TB capacity that you have. The really nice thing here is that the Drobo does all of this without you having to worry about any of it. Just plug it in and it works.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did have some issues at first, but this was due to one of the Western Digital hard-drives, and Drobo’s customer support was incredibly helpful. They actually identified via a diagnostics file I ran for them which drive was bad and generated the return forms for me. Pretty sweet.

Maxtor:

This is a 500GB external drive that I use to backup my MacBook Pro via Time Machine. My hard drive has fried once on me already and I’ve got to say that both this drive and Time Machine worked flawlessly. It could also be used by my fiancee for her backup needs but she prefers a system where she has a shared folder on the Drobo that she drags and drops stuff to (to each their own!).

It has no RAID protection internally, but that’s not a problem for me given how the odds of both it and the MacBook Pro going down are relatively small. If you want absolute peace of mind, you have to look at cloud storage. Here is an awesome article on the subject.

Mac Mini:

It’s connected via USB to the Drobo and Maxtor drive, and to the router via a regular ethernet cord. It runs iTunes (set to launch automatically on boot) and screen sharing so that it can be controlled via the MacBook Pros. It also runs uTorrent to automatically manage torrents I’m interested in as they become available. Since I know the Mini is always on, this is a good place for that to happen. I haven’t set it up so I can access it from anywhere yet, but I’m definitely thinking about it. This is probably a little more expensive than it needs to be for what it does, and if you’re the crafty kind you can definitely build yourself a hackintosh for far less.

Apple TV:

The Apple TV’s main purpose is to play movies and shows on the actual Samsung TV. A quick note here that Apple is really shooting itself in the foot with the naming of that thing because everyone I talk to about this always says “oh that’s cool. And how big is it?” The initial impression is always that the Apple TV comes with a screen just like an iMac would.

Additionally, I can rent or buy stuff directly through the Apple TV, and it gets automatically synced to the Drobo. I have it connected to the router via a physical cord, but you can also do it via Wi-Fi. It also serves the purpose of a hub between the Bose speakers and the Computers. iTunes has this really sweet option to select any speaker connected to another iTunes instance. And since the Apple TV redirects all audio output to the TV and the TV redirects all audio output to the Bose system, any one of the laptops/desktops can take over the speakers as long it’s running iTunes. All you have to do is add it as a shared library. Here are some pointers if you’re here trying to get this to work:

• To manage your Apple TV’s connections, go to Settings > Computers.

• The ‘Connect to iTunes’ link adds your ‘main library’. It should be the iTunes instance that’s on the computer that will always be on. Obviously it should be a desktop that is always powered and always connected to the router.

• The ‘Add Shared iTunes Library’ can add any other computer. The only difference in between the main library and a shared library is that former is accessed via ‘My Movies’, ‘My TV Shows’, etc. while the latter are accessed via ‘Shared Movies’, ‘Shared TV Shows’.

• You can play Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, YouTube videos, and set your own pictures as the TV’s scrolling screensaver when it’s idle.

TV:

It’s a Samsung 40″ LCD 1080p HDTV connected to the XBox, Apple TV and speakers. Not much to say here except that it’s a really great picture quality, incidentally.

XBox 360:

Of course this is mainly to get my Street Fighter IV fix, but it also serves nicely to play DVDs whenever someone lends us a good series and to stream instantly from Netflix online.

Speakers:

I use the Bose Cinemate system, it’s a very nice sound quality although at some point I’ll definitely want a sound-round setup. The nice thing here is that the laptops and desktops can play music on them over Wi-Fi via iTunes.

Well, that about concludes it. I’m very happy with this setup, but in the interest of fairness here are its shortcomings so far:

• I always have to wait a day or two before I can see the latest episode of a show I’m really into (for example Lost) just because they take a little bit to get onto iTunes so far. This wouldn’t be that big a deal except for the fact that all of the Facebook people usually blast spoilers minutes after the end of the episode. Thankfully I don’t mind spoilers too much but still.

• No access to Hulu (yet). There would be ways to set this up via Boxee on the desktop PC I have lying around but since Hulu has specifically started blocking them (grrrr) it’s been harder to get it working.

• That’s it!

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