AppleTV Hack: USB Storage Support Plus Network support

So you have hacked your AppleTV and you have Boxee installed on your device.Now is the time to add that external USB drive that contains all your divx videos to the AppleTv. This blog post will cover how you can set up your AppleTv to recognize the external USB drive attached your AppleTv and also access it on your mac desktop as a local drive.

First you need to install the ATVFiles plugin via the AppleTv . Here are the steps

• From the start menu go to Software->3rd party plugins -> ATVFiles
• The next screen will present you with the possibility to install the ATVFiles plugin if you havent already installed it
• Next, shut down your AppleTv and attach the external USB drive (Formatted as HFS or FAT32 ,NTFS is not supported)
• Start the AppleTv and now you should see an entry for Files on the start menu
• Go to Files->Places and should be able to see all your drives (I guess you should be able to attach multiple drives via a USB hub)

Now is the time to mount that hard drive over the network to your desktop so that you can easily transfer files to it over the network easily like a  local hard drive (This part of the post is mac specific)

• Go ahead and download Macfuse from Google code and install it on your mac (This allows your mac to be able to mount network files systems like FTP and SSH)

• Download Macfusion and install it.  (This application is a plugin for the Macfuse application and it also provides a graphical interface for easily accessing network based drives)

• Start the macfusion application  and click on the plus sign

Select SSHFS and you will be presented with the screen shown below .The Host remains appletv.local ,User Name and Password is frontrow.  The path options represents the path to the drive and it is in the format of  /Volumes/(name-of-your-drive) e.g (/Volumes/storage) (You can check the name of the drive on the AppleTv via the Files menu)

The next screen shows how to label the hard drive on your local machine , leave the Mount Point as default ,Volume Name should be what you want to label the drive on your local machine.

Click ok and you should have the follow screen . Click on mount the next screen and if all went well the drive you be shown as one of the drives in your Volumes on your local machine.  it will look something like this 

You can now drag and drop files to and from it. The sky is the limit to what you can now do with this hack.

Enjoy your files on your movies on your appletv from boxee or xmbc. Personally I am using this set up to host my media files both music and video and other files. Its my network attached storge (NAS). Next will be to get Time Machine to back up to an extra drive attached to it.

NB : You can also just mount the AppleTv without the external drive attached to it.