Hi all,
I have an Apple TV 2 and was wondering how I can go about streaming movies using a Western Digital MyBook external drive.
I understand the movies need to be iTunes but I am trying to work out a way where I can save space on my iMac's internal hard drive and use up the 1TB on the external Western Digital MyBook drive.
Any thoughts, ideas or recommendations would be much appreciated.
AppleTV 2
See
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
Your media will be moved and reside on the drive but still be connected with iTunes, which needs to be running in order for the ATV to read via home-sharing.
Thanks so much for the super quick reply 🙂
What if I wanted to only move the movies to the external hard drive rather than my entire iTunes library?
No problem.
This article explains how to split your library
http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/split-your-itunes-library-between-two-lo cations.php
Thanks again vazandrew 🙂
Once I move the movie folder on the external hard drive will I still be able to play them through iTunes on the Apple TV and iMac?
Once moved the movies won't be playable through iTunes on your iMac when the hard-drive is disconnected. You will be playing the movies on your Apple TV via the computers menu. The movies will be recognized in iTunes when the drive is connected and thus show up via home-sharing on the ATV.
The external hard drive will always be connected, it's actually a 1TB MyBook which requires power being not so portable as the smaller ones.
I use a program called 'TuneSpan' to move itunes media files around you can select movies/tv shows/music and move them seperately, it maintains the links with itunes so they dont get lost
I used it through the beta for free, its just gone to v1 on the app store at $10ish its a bit steep by comparison to other utils but it saves me so much time I bought it.
There will no doubt be other similar progs available...
Ok, so they will continue to be playable. Just from a different location.
Just found this discussion which provides a different alternative by importing the movies into iTunes from your external hard drive.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3789419?start=0&tstart=0
Would this be recommended?
There is nothing to stop you manually putting your files on the external drive and importing to itunes.
turn off the 'feature' where itunes makes a copy of the file as per the discussion you link
The file will stay on the external drive with itunes linking to it.
You'll need to delete the existing movies from itunes (careful not to delete the actual files) and re add/import once they have been moved
itunes wants to handle it all and its gets a little trickier to do it that way, it depends on how involved you want to be with the process.
It's up to you. That would be a little more involved
In my experience, moving a music or video file from one location to another doesn't require re-linking it in iTunes as long as iTunes is open during the move. I find this quite incredibly strong ... but somehow it appears that the Finder keeps track of file locations even for files that are open or in use (try that on a Windows machine ...)
I don't know anything about Itunes yet but I have a question before I buy all this stuff. Can I put an Itunes program on my external hard drive so I do not have to have my mac running to watch apple tv with the videos in my Itunes. They would be on the hard drive connected to the airplay extreme? So essentially can I have itunes open all the time on the external drive? All my movies would be on the external hard drive. That way I do not have to turn on my mac and open itunes to get movies on apple tv.
And one more question if my external hard drive goes to sleep is there a way to wake it with Apple tv or will I have to use my macbook?
Thanks
There is no such thing. The drive needs to be pointed to iTunes, which needs to be running in order for ATV to recognize it. So you will need your computer on.
Not sure on the other question
Couldn't I use that wake software that wakes up your computer to do some file sharing. There is some sort of sharing wake that will also wake up Itunes would that work. It's called wake on demand. I just don't know if that will for sure work. I'm hoping someone can answer that before I drop money on it all the different things.
Apple TV and external hard drive
