I’m a long standing user of both FireCore aTVFlash and the original Apple TV(1). I used to work in a DVD store many years ago and used to buy up all their remainder stock and ended up with a huge collection of films, which when I moved home became a nightmare. Eventually I discovered the Apple TV and FireCore. I spent my entire summer backing up one film after another and retired them to the attic (just in case!)
In the last couple of years I have had 2 “episodes” where power outages or HDD failure has caused me to almost lose all my films. Thankfully, due to data recovery tools that’s not been the case, but I am now at the point where I want a more practical and less worrisome solution. Frankly, I just want to enjoy my films.
So, at present I am streaming film from an external iOmega HDD attached to my Apple iMac. I use a rather interesting, but often flawed app called ‘AirFlick’. I can’t complain as it came free, but it doesn’t always work and / or sometimes I get odd error messages and have to reboot so not ideal.
At the moment I am exceptionally busy working on a University degree course and don’t have time to fiddle or take risks I can’t afford.
Question 1
I am looking for a more efficient means of streaming to my Apple TV 1 (or) looking for a cheap Apple TV 2 and streaming via iTunes.
Would there be any disadvantages in moving from one version to another? (I.e. am I losing anything other than external USB support (which frankly, I am not keen on now))
LASTLY…
Question 2
Can someone give me an idiots guide to how I set the Apple TV 1 up so I can see film artwork etc. Can this be done only via iTunes and / or XBMC or am I missing something? I’d like (even if temporarily) to be able to see artwork for the films I have on my HDD when I go into Nito TV to select a film.
I had a similar thought recently, and went and purchased an ATV2, corresponding Flash, and tested things out. I found for my setup, that ATV1 worked better, because all of my media was in iTunes format.
Lucky for you that’s not the case. From what you’re saying, you should be able to use sapphire to stream your movies and it’ll automatically pull all the art and descriptions remotely from the web. This should be possible using SMB shares or uPnP. Someone correct me if this isn’t right. You could probably test this on the ATV1 as well since it has Sapphire too.
I’d stay with ATV2 if you can get it to work - more capabilities than ATV1. The only downside for me was that it required me to run an open computer to use my iTunes media which defeated the purpose of the setup.
Thank you for replying! I will look into Saphire. The name I know, but thus far I’ve tended to just go into NitoTV and watch films directly from an external USB drive. As it stands I can get the artwork for the films if I save a *.jpg into the film directory and call it precisely the same name as the film.
i.e. Titanic (film) and Titanic.jpg (artwork). The AppleTV displays the artwork, but it means a lot of work for 700+ films, plus I’d like the meta data to be pulled. I’d like almost a film server I guess. I own all the films and like to have the artwork available.
I believe sapphire is a scraper so it will scan your external HDD to fond the media types then go get the meta data for the entire library -but it may require the titles be stored in a particular format and the HDD would need to be identified as a media share. Let me know if it works.
Same situation here: long time ATV1 user. I enjoyed them so much, I would give them as gifts to family and friends (I’d find them used on eBay and “upgrade” them as needed). I purchased the ATV2 about 2 months after it came out and let it collect dust until recently.
ATV1 advantages: 160G HD allows for local storage and portability. It was VERY handy when I spent 6 weeks in London last Fall: watched Podcasts of Nightly News and favorite MSNBC daily politics show. Got BBC iPlayer to work in FireFox and used iPhone as wireless touch screen remote for FireFox using Remote HD.
I (foolishly?) never used Saphire but would create my own Metadata using MetaX (on my Mac) which, like you, creates artwork as .jpg, but also info metadata as .xml and I save both files in same place as content.
I only use Nito for establishing and mounting network shares and then use the ATVFiles Menu to play the content. Nito Player comes in handy when there are some aspect ratio problems in the content.
I also had an HD crash early on, so after I restored my data, I purchased a 2nd HD and I use Retrospect to create a mirror image of one HD to the other automatically every night, as I add to the first one. Now I have a complete backup.
I had some problems with AFP network connections on my ATV2, but recently upgraded it both the Apple iOS software and latest ATVFlash, so I will have to see if it is more stable. I recently brought the ATV2 to a long weekend vacation and enjoyed using it. I put a few movies on my MacBook Pro and streamed easily from it. Used Netflix also. Also like Saphire, it seems to automatically find and download all of the metadata from my complete library. The future is moving away from the ATV1 and rumors have an ATV3 just around the corner.
