Stream movies from external drive to the new Apple TV

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Is it possible to stream movies from an external hard drive (attached to a Mac Mini) to an Apple TV2? The movies on my external drive show up in iTunes on my Mini, but the Apple TV says there are no videos in my library. I don't have room to store them on my internal drive, but it seems like that might be the only way to get them to stream. I have "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" unchecked. Any thoughts?

Best Answer

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...