ATV2 and streaming movies question

[davidjacobs21]

So i just picked up apple tv today and had a quick question. I see all these people on these forums saying they are handbraking all their dvds and streaminng to their tvs. How do you all have the space to do that with lots of movies. I have a macbook pro and only have a 250gb harddrive on it. I have an external hard drive with movies on it, so my question is do i have to put all those movies on to my mac to stream them or can i do it with having my hard drive attached to my mac

 

[spinnerlys]

You can either use an external HDD attached to the Mac you stream from to store your movies or use the internal HDD.
Most transcoded movies from a video DVD take up less than 2GB (even 1GB) per movie anyway.

 

[fpnc]

The only requirement is that the storage must be the same that is used for the iTunes application's media on your Mac/PC. Thus you can use external hard drives or even a USB stick if you so desire. But, of course, iTunes has to be running before you can stream content to the ATV2. This means that you can't (at present) access a "bare" drive from the ATV2 -- "bare" in the sense that it can't be a completely standalone device, you need iTunes running on the Mac/PC since iTunes manages the content stream from your storage to the ATV.

 

[miklovo]

There are MANY answers to this questions and many setup options but the most straight forward one is you take your external HDD and make it the location of your itunes library folder (can be done in preferences>advanced>change folder location). When you open iTunes and turn you ATV on it will stream whatev you've got in iTunes. After you've tested your movies running off the external drive, dump your computer's internal drive.

 

[davidjacobs21]

You can either use an external HDD attached to the Mac you stream from to store your movies or use the internal HDD.
Most transcoded movies from a video DVD take up less than 2GB (even 1GB) per movie anyway.

I attached my external drive to my mac, but how do i get the apple tv to recognize the movies on the hard drive

 

[davidjacobs21]

The only requirement is that the storage must be the same that is used for the iTunes application's media on your Mac/PC. Thus you can use external hard drives or even a USB stick if you so desire. But, of course, iTunes has to be running before you can stream content to the ATV2. This means that you can't (at present) access a "bare" drive from the ATV2 -- "bare" in the sense that it can't be a completely standalone device, you need iTunes running on the Mac/PC since iTunes manages the content stream from your storage to the ATV.

right now i have a bunch of movies that are on ym hard drive from digital copies of my blu-ray movies. i believe they are in mp4 format. does that work, how do i get apple tv to recognize the external dirve once its attached to my macbook pro