Airport Extreme and Apple TV 2!!

Hi,

This has been driving me nuts for a few days now.
I wanted to find a way to stream things from my iTunes library to my Apple TV 2 without having my Macbook on all the time.

Now, after a bit of fiddling, I put my Airport Extreme Base Station on my wireless network by hardwiring it to my BT Home Hub (ethernet). Then into the Extreme Base Station I connected my Western Digital 1TB External Hard Drive, to make it and all its contents available on the wireless network. It worked a treat and being Apple, was incredibly easy to set-up.

I wanted to use this ultimately to stream the content from the Base Station straight to Apple TV 2, eliminating my MacBook.

It didn't work. After some forum searching I found two different answers but both seemed unreliable sources.

So here I am. The two options were:

1. Yes it should work. Connect Apple TV 2 to your Base Station rather than to your network which has iTunes on it, and all your content should pop up no problems.

Or, the other extreme;

2. No it won't work. Although your content will be available on your wireless network, Apple TV 2 needs iTunes open as it relies on Home Sharing to stream from its source.

Can somebody please tell me which is correct! Like I said, its been driving me insane and have been running in circles for days now!!

Thanks for your time,

Mike

#2 is correct. The only exception that I think applies if if the media is on an iPad, iPod, iPhone etc, then Airplay can be used vice iTunes to stream the media. Otherwise you must have iTunes open to stream the media from the Hard Drive. On top of that the media in question must be part of the iTunes library and must be in the correct format to play on the ATV even if it works fine in iTunes.

Thanks for your help.

Seems I've wasted a little money on the base station. First time I've been slightly annoyed at Apple. Seems like it should be something they Gould do.

May as well ask, do you know if any other way apart from iPod/iPhone to stream to ATV without having iTunes open. Would time capsule do it??

No, TC won't help. There are other things out there, Boxee and others, but you have to jailbreak your ATV to make them work. Do a search on the forums, it's been discussed before. I've never used any of them so I have no real comment on how they work etc.

I haven't done it (yet) but you can jailbreak the ATV and set it up so that your media drive is connected directly to the ATV via USB and the ATV thinks that drive is the OS drive as well. So if you set it up with a multi-TB drive and a nice short shielded USB cable, it should be what you want. It'll work as a stand-alone with your TV and you can forget the macbook altogether.

Right now my ATV (gen1) is setup on my network, connected directly into one of the Airport Extreme ports. The ATV is in my family room under my big screen, the Media drive downstairs on my desk with my iMac and Airport Extreme. The only minor hitch is booting the ATV... I use a Belkin IR switched power strip dedicated to the ATV so I can reboot using remote. I use both Boxee and XMBC and its fairly simple to setup. I would like to eventually move the media drive upstairs but I'm a little tentative about doing it as its a little more complicated than the remote setup. There's lots of help in the Boxee forums though so I suggest that anyone wanting to get more out of their ATVs lurk there and then start asking questions. Very helpful crew there.

Alongside drgrafix's post.

You can Jailbreak the ATV2 but unlike the gen 1 you can't connect a USB drive to it directly.

However, a Jailbroken ATV2 can connect to an iTunes library (using home sharing) on your Mac in exactly the same way as an un-jailbroken device but it can also discover and play media from any network attached storage (i.e. your disk connected to the airport extreme). Personally I'd have gone for a 1gb/2gb NAS drive that could connect directly to your Home Hub but the route you've taken will work too.