Adding and Using an External USB Drive

Question

Can I connect an external drive to the Boxee and play content from it?

Answer

You may connect up to two external USB hard drives to the Boxee Box, though the Boxee Box can only power one; a second USB drive would need to have its own external power connection. Alternatively, you can also use a powered USB hub to connect your external drives.

Boxee Box supports the following formats for external USB drives:

• NTFS, FAT32, FAT16
• HFS+
• EXT2, EXT3, EXT4

Before connecting an external drive to the Boxee Box, make sure that it is already formatted.

Note that if you want to write / copy files to these drives from other computers on your network, there are known limitations:

1. NTFS and FAT partitions can be accessed/written to via SMB (Windows computers)
2. HFS+ partitions can be written to if journaling is disabled using the OSX's Disk Utility and if the drive has read/write permissions set to "everyone". **
3. EXT2/3/4 partitions can be written to if the uid is 65534 or the partitions have world write (o+w).

To access the external drive(s) over your local network, go to Settings>>Network>>Servers and "Enable Windows file sharing". (See the Server section of Settings>>Network page).

**In Finder, right click on the USB disk and click "Get Info", at the bottom part you will see the section "Sharing & Permissions"; make sure you set "everyone" to have "read & write" permissions.