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Apple TV and External Hard Drive

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darmstro

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 10, 2012
1
0
Forgive the ignorance, but I'm considering Apple TV and want to know how it's possible to cut the cord with my external hard drive life. My entire music (15K songs) and photo world is on my 2TB external hard drive. I access this through my TV as a monitor and an older Mac Mini through my TV.

If I decide to replace the Macbook mini with an Apple TV, how do I A) get all my content into the cloud, and B) access it through the cloud and feel it's safe and stable?

My lifetime of a digital world is there, and while I managed to make the transition off CDs, etc, well enough, it seems to be even scarier without a USB port to plug in. How do people do this? And how do I get all my new pictures, such as taken with a camera that I plug into the Mac Mini, or even my iPhone, into the cloud?

It seems like there's an obvious connection point somewhere, but I'm ignorant to it and so making the switch seems to have downside...?

Thanks for helping a neophyte out.
 
M

Menneisyys2

macrumors 603
Jun 7, 2011
5,997
1,101
darmstro said:
Forgive the ignorance, but I'm considering Apple TV and want to know how it's possible to cut the cord with my external hard drive life. My entire music (15K songs) and photo world is on my 2TB external hard drive. I access this through my TV as a monitor and an older Mac Mini through my TV.

If I decide to replace the Macbook mini with an Apple TV, how do I A) get all my content into the cloud, and B) access it through the cloud and feel it's safe and stable?

My lifetime of a digital world is there, and while I managed to make the transition off CDs, etc, well enough, it seems to be even scarier without a USB port to plug in. How do people do this? And how do I get all my new pictures, such as taken with a camera that I plug into the Mac Mini, or even my iPhone, into the cloud?

It seems like there's an obvious connection point somewhere, but I'm ignorant to it and so making the switch seems to have downside...?

Thanks for helping a neophyte out.
Click to expand...

There are several threads on this; for example, https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1504711/

In general, there's no "cloud" on the ATV in the sense of iCloud and the like. There is one wat of sharing your own content with the ATV: Home Sharing. That, however, requires a locally running x86 desktop with iTunes on it. No remote cloud at all.

That is, you just can't do with a non-jailbroken ATV the same as with a Mac Mini. The latter is natively iCloud-capable and can access anything in the iCloud; the ATV can't. All the ATV can do is stream your previously purchased stuff from iTunes Store.
 
M

Munchiemonster1

macrumors newbie
Nov 30, 2012
5
0
Yes you can keep movies on an external drive.

Simply connect your USB hard drive to your wireless router's USB port. Then, open iTunes and while holding the option key, drag the contents of this network drive into your iTunes. Holding the option key while adding to itunes prevents the actual files from copying to the local iTunes folder and they remain on the external drive.

It should be noted that the iTunes folder must be located on your computer's internal hard drive. Locating it on a network accessed drive causes eventual corruption of the iTunes library.
 
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