Again a followup on hacking the apple tv. This time I will cover syncing iTunes to an external drive INSTEAD of the internal hard drive. This tutorial was written by the patchstick team, the team behind aTVitter the first Twitter client for the Apple TV.
What you need:
- An “jailbreaked” / hacked Apple TV with external drive and SSH enabled (check the previous tutorial)
1. Connect via ssh to your AppleTV
ssh frontrow@appletv.local
Enter frontrow as password when prompted.
2. Change the synchronization target
cp -R /mnt/Media/* /mnt/Scratch/Volumes/
Replace
sudo mv /mnt/Media /mnt/Media.org
sudo ln -s /mnt/Scratch/Volumes/
Whenever asked for a password, enter frontrow.
3. Fix file ownerships
sudo chown -h frontrow:frontrow /mnt/Media
sudo chown -R frontrow:frontrow /mnt/Scratch/Volumes/
Whenever asked for a password, enter frontrow.
4. Reboot your AppleTV
sudo reboot
11 Comments
I have tried typing the code several times. I have gotten the terminal up and ssh and all but the string doesn’t seem to work. my drive is seen on the apple tv. It is named tv and I can view it in a ftp client and on the flies of the apple tv. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. E
Since my laptop HD is considerably smaller. Will this even be worth it? Or can you make it so the movies stay on the EX HD and not on the laptop HD? Thanks!
On step #2 you tell us “Replace with the name of your own USB drive. Do not use spaces in the name.” The question is: replace WHAT?
Would be fantastic if you could fix that typo. Thanks a lot for the guide!
quick question to anyone that might know. I know there is a hack to enable an external hard drive to be used as extra or primary storage for the Apple tv but does this also mean that any content you may all ready have on this hard drive can be read and played through Apple tv?
thanks in advance to anyone that responds
Hi Danny, I don’t have your email, please write to me so that we can talk a little about Apple TV;)
tomek@doingdreams.com
Hi, can i set up my apple TV so i can load DVd’s to an external hardrive that will play through apple TV?
if so what hardrive would u reccommend?
thanks
I dont understand step 2. I’ve tried this repeatedly and I cant seem to get it to work. Do I copy /mnt/Media/* /mnt/Scratch/Volumes/MYUSB, because if so, /mnt/media/ has my usb drive already mounted their. Can you tell me what I should do, and what the directory should look like. Maybe I copied something wrong and its now messed everything up.
@Anthonyjaffe
if you want to play DVD images or other non-synced content you need to install nitoTV
can anyone help is it possible to get apple tv to see drobo that is connected to airport
I got to the final step of changing permissions but got an error: : Operation not permittedes//.HFS+ Private Directory Data. Do you have any idea how to fix this.
Thanks