[yammy]

Hi All,

I have a jailbroken ATV2 and wanted to connect an external hard drive to the micro USB port however when this is done the XBMC doesn't recognise the hard drive. I have set my external hard drive to my iMac and am streaming the media over my wireless network, I have an issue with buffering and was wondering if anyone had ideas that could overcome this issue. Is it possible to view the media over an ethernet cable?

Any assistance that can be provided would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Yammy

[JWindebank]

Hi All,

I have a jailbroken ATV2 and wanted to connect an external hard drive to the micro USB port however when this is done the XBMC doesn't recognise the hard drive.

I a fairly positive I have read on the forums that you cannot run an external HDD directly from the ATV2 sorry.

I have set my external hard drive to my iMac and am streaming the media over my wireless network, I have an issue with buffering and was wondering if anyone had ideas that could overcome this issue. Is it possible to view the media over an ethernet cable?

The ATV2 has an ethernet port so I imagine you can run it over a wired network without any issue as long as it can read the shares where the media is hosted.

[yammy]

Thanks for the response so just to confirm if I connect an ethernet cable between my iMac and my ATV2 I can use this connection to access my media? instead of streaming th emedia over the wireless netwook...

[JWindebank]

You would need to have a working network just as if you did between two PC's. I am not sure that an ethernet connection directly between the two devices directly would work sorry. Maybe with a crossover cable? If you were to get a small router to act as a central point then you should be able to do so.

[yammy]

Thanks I'll do a bit of investigating into this idea, pardon the ignorance but what is a crossover cable? I am really wanting to resolve this buffering issue, have you had this issue and if so how have you fixed it?

Cheers,

Yammy

[JWindebank]

I have to admit I am not 100% sure if this would work or not. In theory it should as you are essentially just creating a small private network between the two devices but I am not sure if this will allow XBMC to access the shares.

This is a pretty basic guide to networking two laptops via crossover cable that should provide a basic starting point for what you would need to do.

[Ned Scott]

A crossover cable won't be necessary with any Intel Mac (or even some PPC Macs), as well as most Windows and Linux boxes recently made. The internal NIC can auto detect the connection. All you would need to do is:

plug in the ethernet cable between the iMac and the ATV2

On the Mac go to System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet sharing

Share wifi to computers using ethernet.

This will create a little network between the iMac and the ATV2. Not only will the ATV2 have a direct wired connection to the computer, but it will also be able to get full internet access via the Mac as well (for streaming add-ons, etc).

[yammy]

Hi Ned,

Thanks heaps I'll get working on setting this up looking forward to watching media without the constant buffering.

Cheers,

Yammy

[yammy]

Hi All,

I am going to hook up my ATV2 to my iMac to stream movies from the external hard drive attached to my iMac rather than doing this wirelessly. My iMac connects to the internet via my wireless router and can't have a wired connection without a lot of stuffing around, do I need to do anything special with hooking the ATV2 up to the iMac with ethernet and keeping the iMac on the wireless?

Cheers,

Yammy

[Ned Scott]

Hi All,

I am going to hook up my ATV2 to my iMac to stream movies from the external hard drive attached to my iMac rather than doing this wirelessly. My iMac connects to the internet via my wireless router and can't have a wired connection without a lot of stuffing around, do I need to do anything special with hooking the ATV2 up to the iMac with ethernet and keeping the iMac on the wireless?

Cheers,

Yammy

If you enable sharing like I mentioned before to "share wifi to computers using ethernet" then the iMac will still use wifi for its own internet.

Currently, do to some odd networking shuffling that I'm doing, that's what I have set up to give an ATV1 internet. It's connected to my Macbook Pro via ethernet, but the MBP gets internet from wifi. Just follow the steps from before and you'll be all set.

[yammy]

Thanks Ned,

I was just double checking as I didn't mention the imac being connected wirelessly