Lion Streaming and a name by any other name....

First of all, streaming TV & Movies from OSX Lion to Apple TV (or apparently a Mac Mini, and probably anything else)….

I have an iMac which hosts my iTunes library on my home WiFi LAN. This has an external HDD that contains all the media files and usually streams quite happily across the LAN to my first generation Apple TV in the living room.  This setup has worked flawlessly for the past 3 or 4 years and all well and good.  

Since I’ve upgraded to OS X Lion, this hasn’t been quite so smooth.  In fact, any video streamed to the Apple TV seems to stutter and requires re-buffering every minute or so, making watching it almost impossible. In short – it’s become a useless brick.

Now, after some digging, reading of log files and testing of suggestions it appears I’ve found the culprit, who is none other than our good old desktop search friend “Spotlight”.  It appears that the spotlight indexing process is constantly mounting and unmounting the external HDD.  This in turn means that the content is unavailable to iTunes and thus un-streamable to the Apple TV.  Apple TV attempts to re-read the data which forces a mount of the HDD and all is well again until spotlight unmounts it again – about 30 seconds later.

The solution (for now) seems to be to switch of indexing of the external HDD. This can be done via System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy and specifically excluding the drive (or drives).  Once that’s done, a quick reboot and everything is working as it should do.  I’m sure this is a short term fix until the wizards at Apple fix the problem with spotlight – but at least my ATV isn’t just a brick anymore.

I’m also considering an upgrade to a second generation Apple TV during my forthcoming US trip – but time will tell.

Now, on to my second point today….  A name…  Finally I’ve been suspended from Google+ for using my very well know nickname instead of my real name.  Seriously quite annoying.  This means the only way for me to continue using G+ is to come clean.  Very disappointing, but such is the way of things…..   What I can’t understand is why this is so important to Google?   As I’ve said before, outside of work, everyone but everyone knows me as Golfy (or Golfyball if you’re not into the whole brevity thing). 

I’m sure that one day, when G+ is truly opened to the masses I’ll be able to go back to my more well known name – but for now – I am who I am who am I ?

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This post originally appeared here: Posterous