Enable USB on the Apple Tv

The AppleTV is sort of a piece of junk unless you hack it so if you intend to actually get any use out of your apple tv you better do it. Here is how you enable USB so that you can play media off of attached storage (novel concept eh!).

Note: This Tutorial assumes you’re using AppleTV TakeTwo or the latest update (3.0). If you’re not sure run Apple TV’s update before starting

Step 1: Hack your ATV

This is a pretty easy process, you can find instructions here. You don’t actually have to install Boxee but follow the instructions except instead of creating a boxee USB you can just select “SSH”. Great, now to enable USB

Step 2: Install NitoTV

There are lots of ways to enable USB, trust me this is the easiest. SSH onto your AppleTV, download NitoTV and install it. Heres the code:

Valencia:~ ronin$ ssh frontrow@appletv.local Welcome to the AppleTV (via atv-usbcreator) frontrow@appletv.local's password: -bash-2.05b$ wget http://nitosoft.com/nitoTVInstaller_tt.zip -bash-2.05b$ unzip nitoTVInstaller_tt.zip -bash-2.05b$ cd "nitoTV Take Three"/ -bash-2.05b$ sudo ./installme

This will install NitoTV and then restart your AppleTV’s finder, in other words you will have new options on your ATV menu.

Step 3: Prep for USB

Because the apple tv is purposely neutered you’ll need to snag the USB drivers from the 10.4.9 combo update. Heres the code

-bash-2.05b$ cd ~/Documents/ -bash-2.05b$ wget http://supportdownload.apple.com/download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/Mac_OS_X/downloads/061-3165.20070313.iU8y4/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.9Intel.dmg

Step 4: Install USB support

Great, now the combo update has been downloaded to the Documents folder. Go to your Apple TV menu and go NitoTV -> Settings -> Install Software -> Smart Installer

This will take a minute but when its done you can plugin USB drives and your Apple TV will recognize it. Volia!

If your Apple TV doens’t recognize your drive try restarting your appletv either by typing “sudo reboot” or unplugging and plugging in your ATV.

Posted in What are you gonna do?.View Comments

andrew

How do I know if the apple tv has recognized the hard drive? when i view the apple tv in my iTunes, it still reports the apple tv storage space as 144GB but I have a 1TB western digital passport plugged into the usb port. I ran smart installer and it said everything was installed successfully. any ideas? thanks in advance.
Dan

The normal ATV software won't play off of your harddrive without some significant changes. Since you ran the smart installer you installed NitoTV. Nito can play all those files, open up the nito player and see if you can find the hard drive in there.

If you just want a sure fire way to see if the hard drive is connected and mounted ssh in. Once you're logged on type the command "df -h" this will show you every mounted drive you have. If your hard drive isn't in there try unplugging it and plugging it back in and then waiting a minute.
Guest

Thank you very much - got a used 40MB ATV when I realized I could add a terabyte sized external drive. Now I don't have to have to run iTunes to watch or listen to my media.

I have zero experience with Apple's OS but was able to follow you directions and get the USB drive enabled(did take me a couple of hours, mainly looking for a way to figure out the SSH link and how to enter the commands). Guess my next challenge is to format the drive in FAT32.
Dan

Glad to hear it! To get around formatting the drive over ssh just plug that external into your computer and format it. Easy, then plug it in. Good to go.
Dharm Yadav

thanks you it just worked like a charm
smith

thanx a million :-D
Jazon

YOU ROCK!!!!! thanks a lot!!!
Guest

The process above does not work any longer. The file that you download from nitosoft.com is actually nitoTV Take Three. Change the command:

-bash-2.05b$ cd "nitoTV Take Two"/

to

-bash-2.05b$ cd "nitoTV Take Three"/

and all will work.
Dan

I'll correct it, thanks!
MrQwest

This is probably the most extensive write-up I've seen for hacking the AppleTV.

I've got an AppleTV running v3 of the apple OS software. I've patched it using a patchstick, & installed NitoTV, run the combo update, Kext & super installer via the NitoTV menu & I've read lots of pages about getting an external USB drive working, but do you think I can get it to work?

I've plugged 3 different external drives in varing in size from 120GB to 2TB and none are picked up. I even use Putty to 'dk -f' to see what drives are mounted and it doesn't show my external drives at all - none of the 3 appear in the mount list.

They're all NTFS drives as I'm running windows systems at home (no Macs... yet) so what am I doing wrong?

The whole reason I patched my AppleTV was so I could plug in my external drive and watch the media on there at my leisure!

Hope you can help!
Dan

I haven't tested it with v3. I actually keep my atv running on v2. You can downgrade by following these instructions http://patchstick.wikispaces.com/Oops,+I+updated+to+firmware+3.0
MrQwest

Thanks Dan - I'll give the downgrade a whirl! See if that fixes my problem!

Q
Zach

It's the fact that the drives are NTFS that's giving you grief. I had the same problem initially and ended up just breaking down and formatting a drive in HFS. Works like charm for me and I'm running 3.0.2 right now.
kurtcarlton

I want know how to eject the usb hard drive or flash drive after i have watched the movie...is there a way to do this or can i just pull the usb cable out. thanks for the info.

kurt
Dan

To unmount a USB drive you have to ssh in and type "sudo umount /Volumes/[name of the volume]" you can get a listing of volumes by typing "df -h".

If it gives you any grief about unmounting it you can type "sudo umount -f /Volumes/[name]"

You can just unplug the drive but you do run a little risk of screwing up your data.
troysr

This worked flawlessly. I had a 1/2 TB hard drive collecting dust and now its getting a workout. Also, i have a windows 7 laptop and i suggest getting mac drive 8 so you can copy files to your mac hard drive in windows explorer.
mxquattro

THis works great thanks! I got it to play off my USB flash stick just fine. The only problem I see that I cant pause music. If its playing music and I hit pause, it starts another version of it so it plays over the already playing one. Any ideas? I got about 10 versions of the same song playing right now on top of each other :)
Albert

Dan,
I can watch rmvb now, after looking and downloading through many files and waste my time I find your page and indeed today was awesome.

Thank you so much and hope you will continue working to improve atv.
Dan

jwh: I wouldn't do that. Does the partition show up in /Volumes ?
jwh

As a followup...

"diskutil list" DOES show the USB drive is recognized:

/dev/disk1
#: type name size identifier
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *930.9 GB disk1
1: Apple_HFS My Book 930.9 GB disk1s1

So why doesn't nitoTV see it?

If MacOS sees it, is it "safe" to try to make the USB drive my primary storage?
jwh

I followed these instructions "to the T", and my USB drive isn't showing up anywhere in nitoTV (at least not that I see).

After installing nitoTV, there was NOT a ~/Documents folder; so, I manually created it, and then downloaded the dmg file with wget. With this one minor exception, EVERYTHING else worked as described.

The nitoInstall.log indicates success ("2009-09-19 15:46:44.063 nitoHelper[335] Installation completed successfully"), but my USB drive simply isn't showing up -- even after manually rebooting. :-(

Am I missing something?

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Shahar

a. Is there a way to auto mount usb drives / flash every time they are connected to the Apple TV?
b. Does it recognize FAT 32?
giovannizero

To auto-mount you just follow the steps above. The only time it might not auto-recognize the drive is when you first do the hack. After that you'll be fine. Just plug in and you're good to go.

And yes, it does recognize FAT 32 though it's not a very good media storage format. Because of its size limitations (4 GB). NTFS would be better except the ATV can't write to NTFS partitions. HFS+ is the best but ext3 etc should work.
Dan

Jared, sorry, I didn't really make that clear in the article. USB drives will be recognized by the system but the AppleTV it self doesn't have a way to select them for you. Instead you can access and play stuff off of them using a 3rd party app like NitoTV or Boxee.

Here you have already installed NitoTV, so go NitoTV -> Files and then you should see your USB drive.

If its not showing up there then the drive is not mounted.

You may want to use your AppleTV's itunes like library and store that on the external drive. I think you could do that by creating a symbolic link (maybe)...
Jared

When you say that "Apple TV will recognize it" where exactly will the external drive be displayed? Under Settings--->General--->About, the internal capacity is still shown.