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Created July 14, 2011 00:58
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Notes from converting my AppleTV into a media server and NAS.
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AppleTV as Headless Media NAS

I don't use my AppleTV and I've had a 500GB external HD sitting around that isn't really getting use either. I thought I'd make use of both of these things and see if I could turn my AppleTV into a NAS device that would also allow for BitTorrent downloading and act as a transcoding DLNA MediaServer that I could access from my Xbox 360 and/or PS3.

Feature List

Here are the things I wanted to be able to do with my new NAS:

  1. Download torrents by adding them to a simple web interface
  2. Use an external USB drive as a network share for all my computers
  3. Stream movies and music from the USB drive to my Xbox/PS3

Using the steps below, I accomplished my goal!

Step One: Patchstick

I had already installed Boxee on my AppleTV so I didn't need to complete this step when I started up here. All I did was follow the tutorials so it shouldn't be that hard. These instructions are all for AppleTV version 3.0.2 I believe.

Step Two: BitTorrent

This turned out to be very easy as well, I just followed the Awkward TV tutorial and I was in business (note, use the 2.0 download as it requires fewer dependencies). Within about 15 minutes I had a BT client up and running. The only thing I'm missing is an RSS scraper to automatically download torrents from feeds, but I'll work that out soon enough.

Step Three: UPnP

In order to play videos from the AppleTV on my Xbox or PS3, I need a UPnP (DLNA) media server. I thought this would be the toughest part, but as it turns out, XBMC ships with one! So all I had to do is download XBMC via the Launcher menu, then go to System > Network > Enable Sharing via UPnP. After that any videos that are added to the XBMC Library will be available to stream. So easy!

Note: Adding things to the library isn't quite as simple as I'd like, but it's workable.

Step Four: External Hard Drive

The built-in 40GB isn't going to get us very far, so we'll need to add support for external drives. I followed this guide and then using diskutil list I was able to verify that it recognized the external drive. However, the drive was formatted as NTFS so I needed to get it HFS+ before the AppleTV would do anything with it.

Once this was done I added it as a source in XBMC (separate sources for Movies and Television, two directories I created on the external drive). Then I started copying over my existing shows and movies from my Macbook Pro using Cyberduck.

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