AppleTV and atvflash the first month (part 2)

Deciding on exactly how I was and should store all the media and make it accessible to the appleTV (and hopefully the other MacBook and iDevices) should have had more thought before I lobbed headlong into the setup of the system.

In the end I have a NAS that both serves as backup and streamer for all the iTunes content which hasn't changed. It's in the use of local storage and external that it all started to go a little crazy. Originally with the rush of blood of increased capacity, I could and did add external USB drives and move my apple storage. However my first choice of drive was non powered and turned out to just get too hot all the time. Then (after another lengthy syncing process) i moved to a mirrored 2tb USB option which worked well except for the power management settings which turned the drives off when not being used which only served to confuse the poor appletv every time it tried to access it.

In the end the best solution (and current option) was to leave the main apple storage internal and managed by the iTunes sync and add the external drive for all the DVD backups and access them through nitoTV. This is working quite well although I chose to reorganize the derive format aft the initial media scan which caused me more grief. The media system recognized the drive but was horribly confused when the partitioning was different to the original config. Every time I scrolled passed the menu it crashed the appletv. After some creative telnet manipulation I managed to restore the setup and the system is running fairly smoothly now.

The new features and extra storage are fantastic but there are a few lessons to be learnt in planning the drive layouts well in advance of flashing your appletv.

Sent from my iPad