I have searched and searched and searched.
My setup is:

I have an airport extreme base station with a USB hub connected to it. One of the drives connected to that contains almost 1TB worth of TV Shows / Movies, mainly in .avi format.

My atv is also connected to a slingbox, so i can watch all of my media content at home through my slingbox from anywhere on either my MacBook or my iPhone.




My setup WAS as this:

Apple TV at 2.3.1 jailbroken using the atvusb-creator and installed NitoTV. I then mounted the disk with the .avis on by using smb, ip addres 192.168.1.1 and path Server 1.

This worked fine, but every day i needed to reboot my airport extreme for the disk to mount properly on the atv. Everytime i actually tried to remotely watch my server it couldnt mount the Server 1 with all my media on and i had to wait to get home and reboot the router.



So after searching i found that you can save .avi files as reference movies in QuicktimePro and import them into iTunes. So, even with Pro being discontinued in a couple months with snow leopard, ive just forked out £20 to buy it.

Sure enough, i can save my reference movies and import them into my mac's itunes library without fail. I can even browse them and view them (with perian installed) using front row on my macbook.

When i go to Movies/TV Shows on my atv the reference movies do not show up.


I have now downgraded my atv to 2.1 (as NitoTV states in the wiki it works best on 2.1), installed Perian through NitoTV AND tried it through the Software menu. Installed the mPlayer codecs, and still cant view my reference files.

My plan is to install as little amount of software as possible on the atv to be able to view the .avi, so i can browse quicker using my slingplayer.


Please, Please, Please can someone tell me how to either:

A) Get my Apple TV to play back the reference files in my iTunes library

B) Directly connect to my local AEBS and play the .avi back (like NitoTV did) but without dropping the airdisk on a daily basis.


I hope this makes sense and someone can help me. Ive spent a couple weeks on and off on this and there is so much contradicting outdated info out there its hard to work this all out