Potential Newbie Questions regarding External HD

I am thinking about purchasing aTVFlash just for the external hard drive capabilities. I am experiencing too much trouble with streaming over a wireless network to another side of my house.

The question I have is whether I can connect a fully loaded HD to the back of the ATV and have it recognized without needing to do any additional formatting. I have many movies converted via Handbrake and formatted with Metax.

In addition I was wondering if I could also stream music from my main pc while having an external hard drive connected.

I thank everyone in advance for any feedback on these issues.

Yes a ‘loaded’ hard drive full of movies can be connected to the AppleTV. Just be sure you drive is sized 2TB or less and is formatted in Mac OS (HFS) or FAT32 format.

Thanks for the info

How can we watch dvd ISO files on a FAT32 drive? Isnt’ that format limited to a 4gb size? I am confused.

Don’t be! You are absolutely right, and that is why you should format it in HFS+ instead, or you can stream ISOs from an SMB share on one of your other machines on your LAN.

On Linux, you just install HFS+ support, and you will be able to read/write to it, and under Windows, you will need Macdrive to read & write to it.