Hi everybody!

I just bought an Apple TV and have hacked it (with guides) to use an external USB drive as the primary HDD.
But my problem is, the external HDD is 2 TB and my laptop which I sync with my Apple TV is just 320 GB. Is there anyway to sync my iTunes movie-library with Apple TV and then remove them from computer, without them dissapearing the next time I sync with my Apple TV?

I also have to point out that I don't want to do this using Nito TV or XBMC or something like that.

I want to be able to use the standard movie-function on Apple TV.
I'm already converting my entire Movie-library and then adding soft subs, hoping it's possible to solve this problem!

/Sebastian

It may be possible to do this with quicktime reference movies.

The idea being each movie file has a corresponding small ref file created by quicktime, you add the ref files to iTunes and sync them. Once synced you can try deleting the full video file from your mac and keeping the tiny ref file arround. This will cause an error with syncing to the ATV subsequently but you should be able to ignore this error message.

This procedure is often used as a way of tricking the apple tv to play unsupported formats, but in your case it could be used as a way to avoid keeping the full file around on your local machine.

I have not tested this, and there can be audio problems with the reference file trick under ATV OS 2.4.

Otherwise I can't see how this would be possible with the very limited options Apple offers.

This is the main reason why NitoTV, ATVFiles, Sapphire, boxee and xbmc all thrive on the ATV.

Thanks alot for the quick response!

I will try that right away and post the solution here.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem.

/Sebastian

Did it work?

ls

It does actually work, but if you change any info on the movie, or update iTunes or anything like that, the movies will dissapear from your Apple TV :/

im honestly still baffled why anyone would want to sync through itunes, its atrociously slow and i dont see any actual benefit from going through all this effort.

I actually like it, although not exclusively. It's much faster syncing through a wired connection. There is the whole issue of h.264 files playing differently depending on where you play them from. The metadata using iTunes syncing is quite nice. The only other approach seems to be Sapphire and it's quite different.


ls