External hard drive - can this be a shared network drive?

Legacy 1st gen Apple TV
1

Hi there

Have just downloaded this ATV thing and attached an external hard drive to the USB port; confirmed all was well with my Apple music & media; ripped a dvd and copied it across using FTP and played it back no probs. It’s all rather wonderful and totally straightforward and uneventful - a good worthwhile investment I reckon.

What I want to know is: does anyone out there know how to make the external USB drive a global network share? What I want to do is to use and access this drive from any machine on my wireless network and use it as a normal filesystem, just like you can is you hook up an external drive to the Apple Time Capsule, for example.

I would have thought a hack would exist within ATV to enable this.

2

Unfortunately the AppleTV is not able to share attached drives on a network.

An alternative option would to to connect the external drive to an Airport Extreme (or other router that supports USB drives). This would allow the drive to be shared on the network for the AppleTV or any other device to access.