[matneh]

Hi folks,

Here's the situation-- all my home movies are backed up to an external hard drive using Time Machine on my Mac.

I'd like to be able to connect my Time Machine drive to the Apple TV and watch the videos using XBMC. The file format is fine, but Time Machine is very clever and uses hard links to directories to perform some of its magic:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/...tml&page=3

However, when browsing through the directories in the XBMC file manager, these hard links show up as small files, and I cannot navigate into my Movies folder.

Any ideas? Is this because Apple TV is based on 10.4 and directory hard links are only supported in 10.5 (Leopard)? Is there some other way to represent the directory so I can see the files inside?

Thanks,
Matt

[davilla]

Hi folks,

Here's the situation-- all my home movies are backed up to an external hard drive using Time Machine on my Mac.

I'd like to be able to connect my Time Machine drive to the Apple TV and watch the videos using XBMC. The file format is fine, but Time Machine is very clever and uses hard links to directories to perform some of its magic:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/...tml&page=3

However, when browsing through the directories in the XBMC file manager, these hard links show up as small files, and I cannot navigate into my Movies folder.

Any ideas? Is this because Apple TV is based on 10.4 and directory hard links are only supported in 10.5 (Leopard)? Is there some other way to represent the directory so I can see the files inside?

Thanks,
Matt

I actually can't quite figure out where you are running XBMC, on the ATV or your OSX box. A pastebin of the xbmc.log would be helpful, oh wait, we always ask for xbmc.log on ALL issues.

[matneh]

Touche!

I'm running XBMC on my Apple TV, connected to a USB hard drive which is formatted as "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)". I thought it would be a simple "No way this will work" or "Here's how it should be handled." I'll work on getting the xbmc.log from when I try to enter the hard linked directory.

[matneh]

Ok, here you go:

http://pastebin.com/f34f5fbfe

I setup a flash drive with the following structure:

Code:

soft_link.dv
hard_link.dv
Latest/
Movies/
  clip.dv
Oldest/
Movies/
  clip.dv

Latest/Movies and Oldest/Movies are directory hard links
soft_link.dv is a soft link to Latest/Movies/clip.dv
hard_link.dv is a hard link to Latest/Movies/clip.dv

In the XBMC file manager, Latest/Movies and Oldest/Movies show up as 0 byte files, and I cannot navigate into them, create them as a media source or anything. You cannot even see me try to navigate them in the xbmc.log.

When I try to play soft_link.dv, it gives an error (you see in the log file)

When I try to play hard_link.dv, no problem.