I got an AppleTV the other day and have got it all hooked up. It is very slick, but really annoying in one respect and unfortunately that is why I actually bought it.
First I should explain that I have a small child, so the first thing I like to do with a new DVD is back it up. This is from experience of knowing it can last anything from a week onwards.
Obviously this gives me a management problem. I usually put films on my 80gb iPod video and that is very full. I now either delete ones he doesn’t want to watch anymore, or back them up to an external drive using Senuti to pull them off the iPod. I have a MacBook with a 120gb drive which only has 10gb left so I don’t have the option of keeping them on my mac.
So I bought the appletv with a 160gb hard drive so I could move the films off the iPod and onto the appletv. Trouble is that the sync is either automatic or semi-automatic. No manual management.
That means that I am effectively only able to use a few GB of the drive, unless of coarse I buy everything again from the iTunes store. This seems really odd on apples part. Why would you do it one way for the iPod and another for appletv?
The end result is that I really can’t use the atv to anywhere near it’s full potential. So I am left with a choice of using a device that should work for what I need it for, but doesn’t or hacking it so it will work!
What to do, what to do! Any advice out there?