[jhonny30]

Hello guys,
I am new to this stuff, but I think I really understand the thing. But I have one little problem.
I am going to get an ATV very soon, and I wanted to expand my storage capacity...A friend of mine uses N.A.S but as I always have my iMac running, I imagine I can buy a cheaper USB external Harddrive and use this external HD instead of an NAS which is more expensive.
I went to an electronic shop and wanted to buy a USB 1TB HD...but the guy told me that I need to buy a HD which I can connect straight to my router via ethernet cable.. Otherwise I couldn't stream...
I really don't think he is right,but I wanted to check it with you...
Can I buy the normal USB HD and connect it to my iMac and then "tell" xbmc to look for the files on that HD?
Thanks guys

[SecretSquirrel]

Hello guys,
Can I buy the normal USB HD and connect it to my iMac and then "tell" xbmc to look for the files on that HD?

Yes - I do just that with a couple of 1TB USB drives connected to my iMac - they are accessed as SMB shares. There are a couple of things to configure but not much.

[jhonny30]

wow wow wow...
what is SMB? That's nothing to do with 3th party application? I don't need a special programm to allow the xbmc to get files on the external HD? Where can I find how to do this?
Is it this one?
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Macintosh_Fi...Sharing%29

[SecretSquirrel]

Yes that's it.

You can basically set which user accounts can share their files in Preferences.

I set up a new account called XBMC for SMB sharing (non-admin type), and then placed a symbolic link to the media folder on the external drive in the XBMC user's Movies folder (it could go anywhere really but this seemed logical).

The symbolic link allowed me to access the external drive content via the Movies folder in the user account from AppleTV - I'm sure there's an easier way just giving the path to the external drive but I've not looked into that as what I did works. If anyone can give a pointer to the style of pathname needed for direct external drive access I'd be grateful.

Aliases don't work and creating symbolic links requires fiddling with Terminal but I found a little utility which adds the option to the Finder context menu.

The 'XBMC' user does not have to be logged in for the share to work, as AppleTv behaves as the user accessing across the network when it needs access. You don't have to create a new user and could use an existing one but I thought better to use an 'empty account' for security purposes.

[jhonny30]

Thank you

[osxrulz]

I just have a USB HDD connected directly to my atv. Used NitoTV to enable USB and never looked back.