forum.excito.org

My original file server was a Mac Mini with an external USB drive. This was nice because it provided native iTunes and iPhoto support as well as good old standard file service. Well, when it was time to upgrade for other reasons, I decided to go with the Bubba 2 (well, two, actually, one for here and one at my parents' place for a remote backup).

Unfortunately, the Bubba can't really speak to an AppleTV. Sure, it can serve music to iTunes running on any Mac, but the AppleTV requires a sort of handshake/password entry to connect to iTunes. And no Linux DAAP solution can currently emulate that. And of course the AppleTV's disk is too small to hold all of the music. So that means I'd need to keep my Mac Mini running after all. But even if I did that, it would double my network traffic when serving music---because the Mini would read from the Bubba, and the AppleTV would read from the Mini.

Hence my challenge: find a way to get the AppleTV to read its entire media library directly from the Bubba. Well, I've done it. Specifically, my AppleTV is currently grabbing its /mnt/Media directory from the Bubba via NFS. I use my Mac's iTunes program to build that directory, and it took a LONG time. But now that it's done it doesn't need to be present for the AppleTV to work.

If anyone else here is interested in doing the same thing, let me know and I'll provide some instruction. It requires that you hack your AppleTV to gain SSH, and that you have a computer running iTunes that can access the Bubba directly as well. Oh, and it requires a little special sauce to prevent your music from being duplicated in two different places on your Bubba.

I am little bit interested to check this in apple tv but how can i able to gain SSH,my computer having good capacity to play i-tunes and bubba as well as so give me briefly information to create according to your comment.give me suggestion.

Calvin,

Warning, UNIX expertise required here.

First, get AppleTV updated to the latest software, if necessary.

Second, hack the AppleTV to gain SSH access: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Install_SSH

Next you have to get NFS mounting working on the AppleTV. To do that, you need to grab the MacOSX 10.4.9 Combo Updater and extract the file "/sbin/mount_nfs", and copy it over to the AppleTV. Make sure you get its permissions right: This page has a link to the Combo Updater: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Take_2_Full_Update However, I do NOT recommend that you install NitoTV, Perian, or any other web software as that web page suggests. It just seemed to make my AppleTV crash often.

Once you've done that, create a "frontrow" user on the Bubba with UID and GID of 501. NFS export that home directory /home/frontrow, and mount it on the AppleTV *temporarily*: If this doesn't scare you so far, I can take you further. Let me know.