My iTunes music folder and all of my movies (in separate folders) are on an external drive. In fact, it's a NAS RAID box, but it's mounted on my Mac mini.
You just have to load the movies into iTunes. When you do, they'll be visible to the Apple TV. Of course, they have to be in the MP4/M4V favored by Apple. If you want to watch AVIs, etc., you'd have to "hack" your Apple TV. Haven't done this, but it sounds pretty easy these days.
Maybe we'll get an ATV Apps Store soon, and it will be easy to load other apps and stream all sorts of stuff to the ATV...
You're missing the "Library". The media folder contains the actual audio files, but you need a library pointing to it. The 1st approach is, move everything and make all the iTunes open the same library.
Won't work because when Machine 1 opens the Library.xml, it locks it. Bummer. But turns out that there's a way to do it, if you're willing to involve Dropbox and some patience, check the link but for reference, the idea is:
- Move your entire iTunes folder to your home network drive.
- Copy the iTunes library (database file, XML files) to your Dropbox folder
- Create an alias of the network drive’s iTunes Music folder and place it in your Dropbox folder. Be sure to rename it to iTunes Music (remove the word “alias”). Create an alias of the Album Artwork folder, too. If you skip this step, whenever you import music to your library, it will be copied to your Dropbox folder instead of your network drive. The aliases ensure iTunes places all new library items on the network drive.
- On each Mac, configure iTunes to use the library file located in the Dropbox folder. Do this by holding option on your keyboard when clicking the iTunes icon in your dock. You will be prompted to choose an existing library or create a new one. Click “Choose Library” then navigate to your iTunes database file in your Dropbox folder.
You can now access your iTunes library on each Mac without using Home Sharing. iTunes will behave identically on each Mac; you can add music, edit playlists, and sync your iDevices without Apple’s usual restrictions.
There are a couple of Caveats and Gotchas, so check the link for more information.
Or you could just do what I did… get iTunes Match and enjoy a simple easy to use environment. I am really happy the way it works, the caveat is, of course, you will be using bandwidth (or needing it) to stream/download a song. So if you have no connectivity, you can't listen (you can always have one or more machines with a copy of the songs, I have my "master" machine with the 90GBs of music locally, but the Macbook Air and iPhone 'stream' on demand).
The other caveat is that if you "save" local tracks (you can), then you're effectively duplicating your copy. But hey, you can remove/download as you please, as long as it's in the "cloud".
Finally, iTunes Match is for music, so for videos and such, you will have to use Home Sharing (with the annoyance that it's "read only" for the connecting computers), but for music, you can buy/add from any authorized device… and you need to be in a country that supports it (and willing to pay 25 dollars/year). :p
Best Answer
There's an easier solution to this than re-importing, and it works for both movies and songs (and probably everything else, but I haven't had reason to try it on any other media type).
In iTunes, go to the File menu, then select Library, and then Organize Library. On the resulting dialog, check "Consolidate files". When you hit OK, any files that have somehow gotten stored in the wrong place will move back to where they belong on your external drive.
After this has completed (it might take a couple of minutes, since I'm assuming that a movie file is big), you can test it out. Command-click on your movie and select "get info", and then look at its file location on the General tab. Its file location should show that it's on the external hard drive. Then you can try to play it. If it plays successfully, you can then delete it from your internal hard drive.