Is it imperative that you use a USB flash drive of 1 GB in size or less? I have a 2 GB drive. Do I need to go out and get a smaller drive?

Thanks for the update Merlin!

Don’t mean to be the big nerd on the block that sits around finding technical inaccuracies in blog postings, but I thought I’d mention that Transmit does do SFTP. I used that for my website syncing for some time. Now, I’m a Flow user (also does SFTP).

Anyway, that might save you some Fugu/shell pain at some point in the future.

Cheers!

Did you notice that with the new remote app on the iPod or iPhone you now can easily enter your configuration data, YouTube searches etc.? The little keyboard pops up on the iPhone/iPod everytime you need to enter something on your AppleTV. Very nice feature!

Merlin,

Given use of a USB source essentially removes iTunes from the equation don’t you think you’ll miss the media server function that it serves?

Personally I find myself almost always going for the most compatible formats from Visual Hub nowdays so I can playback content on the AppleTV, my 3yo son’s iPod (yes I know…) or the iPhone.

I find the initial pain of ripping the DVD/converting the avi and setting up metadata in Lostify is worth it in the end for the convenience of having all content sources from the same location.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards

Scott

I’m hoping Merlin or someone familiar with the aTV can answer this for me….

I see on the page for the aTV 3.2 that it offers “drag and drop” transfer of files between Mac and AppleTV but leaves the stock features of the device the same. So…it’ll still sync with my iTunes but I can also drop in files like AVI or VIDEO_TS and they’ll play - great.

But my little Apple TV is only 40 GB so what I’d really like to be able to do is stream all those previously unsupported file formats. Preferably, tell the AppleTV where to look for them on my Mac (maybe a specific folder) and have all that available on the AppleTV no matter the video format.

Is this possible or maybe something close to it? Otherwise I’m not keen on spending the $50.

Has anyone tried the Remote App with Couch Surfer? If so can you type url’s with your iphone/touch, I’m on the fence about which way to go… Mini or Apple TV. If you have tried this please speak up.

You might want to try out Plex ( http://www.osxbmc.com/ ) on the Mac mini; it’s a fork of the OSX port of the very mature and open source XBMC, and it’s really coming into it’s own as one of the best media centres available.

You can have it start automatically at boot, and they are looking towards smoothly playing 1080p content on the current generation minis.

It also supports the apple remote.

If it’s something you try out, make sure to test the following couple things:

1) Add the source of “/Volumes” - this lets you browse any folder, mounted or otherwise (even sshfs, etc) 2) Play with the Library function - All you have to do is open the menu on a sorted folder (“Movies”, for example), then set the content as movies and let it run a scan. Switch to library mode, and enjoy the automatic power :)

Hi Merlin,

On Macbreak Weekly you were talking about this and implied that you could use it to install regular mac apps. Would that work for something like Flip4mac’s Drive In?

http://www.flip4mac.com/drivein.htm

Seems to me that it might work, because the Nito TV wiki talked about installing a DVDplayback framework, then if Drive in were taking care of the disc images, you’d be golden.

Thanks.

Thanks for your MacBreak discussion and this blog for the AppleCores solution for ATV. Installing today. Along that line, NBC is planning to stream video of Olympic events. I am looking for a Mac solution to capture streams, then postprocess via Visual Hub and view via ATV.

I’ve tried Snapz proX, which does the job but the files are huge, 30 GB for 30 minutes of video.

Thanks,

just did aTVFlash v3.2 last weekend - awesome.

i used a 2GB Sandisk Cruzer ‘Colors+’, worked fine.

you can use iTunes just the same, or play content from ‘other sources’ - you select on the AppleTV menus which ‘application’ to use - Music, Videos, Podcasts, etc, for iTunes content + “DVD” (aka nitoTV), “Files” (aka ATVFiles), ‘Media’ (aka Saphire’) for non-iTunes media - whether it’s on the AppleTV’s hdd, on a USB drive plugged in (OMG i was wondering if Drobo would work!), or even on a AFP/SMB network share from any other computer.

there’s one catch with the AFP/SMB stuff. the nitoTV installer is capable of enabling that, but you’ll need either:

(a) an original v1.0 AppleTV (i.e. the version before Youtube) whose ‘recovery partition’ still contains the original v1.0 recovery image (software updates never change this)

or

(b) go find this recovery partition image out there on the net somewhere.

after that the instructions for doing it should work. i can now drag-n-drop media even via Finder onto my AppleTV, then play it with nito/etc. brilliant!

So I have AppleCore’s patchstick and I’ve installed it onto my aTV but how the heck do I actually FTP into my aTV? What is the username and password I’m supposed to use? Any info on that would be appreciated.