Question about Apple TV

Not really. It needs a source of the movies for syncing or streaming, which means your movies need to be on a hard drive somewhere. Some sync movies or TV shows to the ATV, then delete the original files from their hard drives, but not in iTunes controlling the ATV. This leaves the movies/shows on the ATV while freeing up space on your hard drive.

shuffles said:

Im currently considering getting Apple TV and was wondering.......I need an external hard drive for all my music/movies etc. Is the Apple TV pretty much an external hard drive? I mean, cud i jst get one and not bother getting a hard drive as well??

Thanks for your help. (Be gentle)

Cheers,

Shuffles.

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Caveman is correct. No matter what size Apple TV you buy, the disk drive that lives inside of it (40 or 160 GB) is owned only by the Apple TV. No one else can share it.

iTunes will sync music, photos, and video to it, but think of it as a one-way street.

shuffles said:

Im currently considering getting Apple TV and was wondering.......I need an external hard drive for all my music/movies etc. Is the Apple TV pretty much an external hard drive? I mean, cud i jst get one and not bother getting a hard drive as well??

Thanks for your help. (Be gentle)

Cheers,

Shuffles.

Click to expand...

Well..... yes you could but you wouldn't be able to get many movies on there even with the 160 GB ATV. It would be better to just buy an external HD and stream. With the 160 GB ATV you might be able to squeeze 60 - 80 movies depending how you rip them. Also depends how much music you have. My opinion is external memory is cheap these days. I have two 1TB drives for my library Getting the info on it to view on ATV is easy.. getting it off as a storage device for your computer would be difficult

f(A)t'kId said:

Well..... yes you could but you wouldn't be able to get many movies on there even with the 160 GB ATV. It would be better to just buy an external HD and stream. With the 160 GB ATV you might be able to squeeze 60 - 80 movies depending how you rip them. Also depends how much music you have. My opinion is external memory is cheap these days. I have two 1TB drives for my library Getting the info on it to view on ATV is easy.. getting it off as a storage device for your computer would be difficult

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Sorry. One of us misunderstood the OP's question. So I'll just answer it as directly as possible.

1. The Apple TV's HDD is not accessible as an external HDD for general-purpose storage.
2. Every movie or CD you rip & encode must live on your PC/Mac's internal HDD OR on an external HDD hooked up to your computer. Once/If you sync the movie to Apple TV, you could delete it from your computer. If you delete it, the next time you sync, it will be deleted from the Apple TV. (Works the same way as an iPod would.)

So, to sum it up, buy yourself an external HDD.

MikieMikie said:

(Works the same way as an iPod would.)

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TBH, that one statement has answered so many of my questions about the product. I'm not sure if its because I've just not considered an ATV before and as such I've not looked in to it, but I have to admit to being a bit unsure about what the box was and how it all works.

Thanks!

Yeah, well with Take 2, the Apple TV will have a more autonomous role, too. Material synced from iTunes still behaves in the "iPod" manner, but with Take 2, you can buy/download content directly to the Apple TV. This material gets synced back to iTunes.

Downloaded rental movies are the exception. If the download happens to AppleTV, that's where it lives until appropriate auto-deletion.