External Hard drive and Atv

[theslaz]

Got a Atv as a gift. Have it hooked up and networked with Itunes in my Windows 7 machine using one of my internal Hard drives. Have bought a new 1 terrabyte drive. Have loaded numerous movies on this drive and now I would like to use this drive as my "Library" in Itunes. I know how to set Itunes to use this hard drive. One question! When I do this will Atv and Itunes want to sync the movies from this new hard drive unto the Atv drive. I obvisiouly don't want to do that. I just want Atv and Itunes to use this drive as a source for my movies and not copy anything over to the Atv drive.

Need some advice on how to do this.

 

[tom1971]

Just select "streaming" instead of syncing and you are good to go.

 

[theslaz]

I looked all over to find anything even mentioning streaming in Itunes and I came up with negative results!!!

How does one stream instead of sync???

 

[theslaz]

This is a copy and paste from a previous post with a similar problem. Pasting this just in case someone comes across my post; so that there is a solution for them; as this worked for me.

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There are a few different ways to approach this. Personally, I keep all my music on my internal hard drive and all my video on an external hard drive. You can move to this arrangement by copying all your videos to an external drive, then deleting them from your iTunes library. Then, navigate through the menus to iTunes/Preferences/Advanced and un-check the "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" flag. Now, just drag the folder(s) containing your video files on the external hard drive from a Finder window to the Library tab on the left side of the iTunes application window. Your iTunes library will now point to the video files on the external drive.

This works well for me since I embed all my cover art and meta data tags in my videos with MetaX, rather than relying on anything stored in the iTunes library. If you have entered cover art and tags through iTunes "Get Info" panes, you may lose them with the above procedure. There are ways to hold onto the info in the iTunes library when you move the files, but that is a bit more advanced.