First Generation Apple TV - My Movies Files

[Krock1598]

I am trying to acccess the "My Movie" files from my 2007 1st gen Apple TV - these are home movies that I uploaded back when iTunes allowed you to share your own videos across devices. Fast forward 17 years and I am trying to access these video files and the only place I can find them is on the 1st gen Apple TV....

I can't seem to find a way for these videos to populate under "Home Videos" on current Apple TV accesss. Tried to plug in USB to Macbook from the 1st gen Apple TV - did not work.

Please help

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

1. Open AppleTV. I think I remember it is only 4 screws on the bottom, under the rubber footer. Tip: be careful removing the footer. It is glued down and can easily rip if you don't take your time.
2. Remove the hard drive inside the AppleTV.
3. Put it in a HDD enclosure you can connect to your present Mac. I believe that was formatted IDE instead of SATA so you may have to shop around to find one for IDE... though a quick search of Amazon turned up many for under $20.
4. Use Mac Finder window to navigate to the folder that holds the movies.
5. Success.

I don't think you'll find a simple way to access it directly without #3.

The OTHER option is to locate the old Mac drive from which these Synchs would originate. If that Mac is dead, go from Step 2 in the above list with its Hard Drive and you can probably get them from there. Since AppleTV internal drives were small, you may find that you have more home videos you can recover this way than only what would fit on the AppleTV internal drive. This could be well worth the effort to find some potentially "lost" home videos of which you may have forgotten you have (but did not sync to AppleTV).

 

[Boyd01]

You might be able to jailbreak it to get full filesystem access, I know that was popular a number of years ago but I have no experience with it. A quick search found this article, but I suspect you'll get better info elsewhere (perhaps in old threads right here at MacRumors).

I wouldn't attempt jailbreaking if you still want to use it, a failed jailbreak could "brick" it. OTOH, I also wouldn't attempt opening it up and removing the hard drive if you plan to continue using it.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I can verify that opening it up as described in #2 is quite easy for even tech novices. Just 4 screws and the drive is easily accessible. It's nothing like modern Apple tech where it's sometimes 50 steps that must be done in specific order and requires "kits" and special "glue" etc.

If OP does #2, it will work. And as soon as they have retrieved the movies, putting the drive back, screwing in the (I think) 4 screws in the base and then sticking the rubber footer back on is easy too (no new glue required). There's likely still YouTube videos about this to show how easy it is. Yep...