AppleTV as a Movie Server?

 Is there a way to add a lot of movies to the AppleTV? I have about 700 DVD's that I'd like to send to it (if possible). Can't a separate drive be attached to the AppleTV to put those movies on. I have a pair of Sony DVD Jukeboxes and they are OK, but it would be much nicer to have them all tied directly to the AppleTV.

The AppleTV does not have USB Host device support under it's iOS 4.1 release, as such you are not able to currently mount an external hard drive to the AppleTV.

What you can do however is if you have a hard disk connected to your Wireless Router and shared via AFP, you can mount that drive on your AppleTV and use it as additional storage.

However, for what it is worth, the necessary applications do not currently exist to allow you to play those files via the AFP share.

Once someone writes an update frappliance for the AppleTV2,1 than we will be able to gain that kind of functionality through the Front Row interface. 

Another possibility is that someone writes a replacement application to replace Lowtide (Boxee, XBMC) that can point to files residing on your local filesystem instead of presented via Rendezvous/Bonjour. 

If you instead wanted to use an AppleTV1,1 or AppleTV1,2 you can do those things today.