If I buy a movie, does it stay on my Mac or Apple TV Hard Drive?

[JGeorge07]

I'm about to buy an Apple TV and can't seem to find the answer to this anywhere online. If I buy a movie, does it stay on the Apple TV or my home computer (iMac)?

The reason I ask is, I would like to have my movie collection completely digital. The Apple TV HDD has enough space, but I don't want that to also be taking up valuable space on my computer.

 

[gr8tfly]

It will sync the movie to your computer, but you can then move it to a different drive - as long as iTunes knows where it is. Once that's done, the drive can go off-line, unless you need to play it on the computer.

I've been using my tv this way (it's upgraded to a 250GB drive), so I don't need my MBP open and running. I keep all my large media on an external drive, but keep my music on my internal.

 

[JGeorge07]

So if I buy a movie on Apple TV, it will sync to my iMac automatically. Then I can just move the movie to a flash drive or whatever, remove the flash drive, and the movie won't "re-sync", correct?

Just want to make sure I understand. And thanks for the help too.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

So if I buy a movie on Apple TV, it will sync to my iMac automatically. Then I can just move the movie to a flash drive or whatever, remove the flash drive, and the movie won't "re-sync", correct?

Just want to make sure I understand. And thanks for the help too.

DANGER DANGER!

Do not use a flashdrive to back up anything. Flash drives are only a way of moving files around, never a backup solution.

 

[gr8tfly]

So if I buy a movie on Apple TV, it will sync to my iMac automatically. Then I can just move the movie to a flash drive or whatever, remove the flash drive, and the movie won't "re-sync", correct?

Just want to make sure I understand. And thanks for the help too.

Correct. Unless you change the setting for a particular movie in the tv "Movies" tab, it won't care. (I've been doing this for a long time now, but just for fun, I checked it out [again] by unmounting my external drive and hitting sync. All is well.)

edit: +1 on not using the flash drive. Put the file on an external hard drive AND burn a DVD ("data").