In our house, a Mac Mini serves at the content library host. It runs iTunes and shares other media files. At night it runs a number of scheduled tasks to keep things orderly and fresh, and when its done (at about 4:00am) it goes to sleep until 8:00am when my wife will want to use it again.
TwonkyMedia server, which is delivering our non-iTunes content onto the AppleTV (via the MediaCloud uPnP client) has a problem with this. It doesn’t recover well from sleep.
The solution is to run an AppleScript every morning at 8:01 to re-start TwonkyMedia. This little AppleScript will access Twonky’s built-in shell script to shut down any running instances, and start-up a fresh one:
do shell script "/Applications/MediaServer.app/Contents/MacOS/twonkymedia.sh &> /dev/null &"
The “&> /dev/null &” sends the shell script’s output to oblivion so that AppleScript doesn’t hang waiting for the server to start-up.
The only annoying part about this is that every time TwonkyMedia starts up, it wants to take you to its home page in your browser. Follow these directions to make TwonkyMedia start-up silently (last post on the page.)
