I am putting all my itunes music on my external HD. now how do I access it from the apple TV. Do I have to play them form my computer not the apple TV?
Thanks for any help.
Hi Mike,
I currently run an external HDD on my laptop with all my iTunes content and had been using ATVFlash to allow a second external HDD on the ATV for media that I want to access on the HDTV. I’m not sure which you want to do…
External HDD for iTunes content is a great, great, great way to go! The solution is seamless, although it does take up a USB port permanently as I always leave it connected. iTunes have also written some good software for this - say, for example, you are travelling and don’t have the HDD where your media is kept. Anything new you download will be kept in a storage location ready to be sync’ed with the HDD when you are back home - genius!
With regards to using a HDD for the ATV, it takes some playing to get it going. You need to format to FAT32 for it to work (assuming you are running Windows) and Windows doesn’t like formatting anything over 32gb in FAT32. Google fat32format.exe for a nice DOS app that will do this, though.
Once connected, it’s a great solution - HOWEVER… I had to disconnect and reconnect the HDD with the ATV for the 4.0ATVFlash update and it’s given me huge problems. As the Wiki says, no data was ‘lost’ although the ATV didn’t identify it as media after the reconnect and I have had to reformat the whole drive again - loosing a fair amount of (not backed up) media. Frustrating, but I should have known better…