My wife and I want to sync/share videos

Question

My wife and each have a computer, + iPhone + iPad + AppleTV of course. We'd like to share videos, but we are finding it next to impossible. If I have a movie on my system, I can sync it to AppleTV, but she can't sync her movies. Most of these are either rips of DVDs she has (Friends episodes) or lots of home movies I've created, or home movies she's done of our son. The problem is that she creates a movie, and she can't sync it, which means she needs to send it to me, and then I need to sync it, which is just twenty steps too much, as we now have a bunch of copies of the movie. Couple this with music, pictures, and everything else. Then, we have to deal with moving them to the iPad if we want to bring it with us.
We have the AppleTV, which we though would be a nice central hub of media that we could save to, and take from, but apparently you can't do this by default. AppleTV is for one person homes?
So, here is what we'd like to do, easily.
My wife and I have media we'd like to play on our TV at times via AppleTV. We'd also like to be able to put this media on our iPhones/iPad and take it with us. How can we do this? It's really simple what we want, and we can't fathom how it can be difficult at all to do this, when we can easily share a video with friends and family on Facebook.

Answer 1

jasonlotito wrote:
First, yes, I'm aware of AppleTV's syncing problem. Streaming seems like a good solution for part of the problem, though that still leaves the problem of syncing to other devices: iPad/iPhone.
Streaming is great actually as it gets over the 160GB drive limitation in AppleTV (actually most of mine are 40GB AppleTVs, and I just stream things to them).
Downside is you need iTunes running as AppleTV cannot access files directly, as all data moves to it /from it via iTunes (except AppleTV's internet intercations).
The Home Sharing seems like an interesting solution. I'll explore that.
It should allow you to play/access media on different computers via iTunes but I don't think it will allow you to sync to iPhone/iPad/AppleTV from another user's library. Someone who regularly uses it will be able to clarify.
The network storage thing is also interesting. With so many devices, it might be a good idea to centralize all the stuff.
That's the idea - to centralize stuff on the network and allow multi-user access.
So, basically, we could setup a network storage device as a library separated from our own local stuff.
You wouldn't actually set the itunes library up on the network storage (you could in theory thoufgh), just use it as storage accessible to an itunes library on a computer.
Media known to the iTunes database can be stored in the actual iTunes media folder, or on any attached internal/external drives or network drives.
The setting I mentioned in iTunes determines what happens when you add a new file to iTunes - either a copy is made in teh iTunes media folder, or the itunes database just remembers it's current location without copying - so long as the location is accessible eg network/usb drive you could then sync to a device like AppleTV/iPad etc without having a copy in your itunes media folder.
We could then sync to AppleTV, iPhone, iPad, etc? And from what I remember, we could also sync to the devices what we want via the syncing control panel.
In theory yes.
If this is true, I like this idea. We could do our own personal stuff on our computer, prepare everything, and then save it to a central library we could still access. Then, sync our devices from that one central repository.
This to me seems the logical option.
Could you recommend an easy to use, large, network capable storage device that could be used for such a system?
I don't have one myself (we have several computers but I tend to handle all the media on my Mac Pro with lots of attached internal/USB/FW drives), but you have numerous options including Time Capsule from Apple that goes up to 2TB - be sure to check user reviews for these devices at places like Amazon to get a heads up on any potential issues.
The only issue with network storage is that of it being potentially (usually) slower than directly attached drives/internal drives, but this will depend on your actual network setup/speed/connection types and whether or not there's lots of concurrent traffic. Even a slow network will sync but if it's very slow streaming might not be as smooth as it might be.