Another way to stream to XBMC on an ATV2 from a Lion Mac

A couple of days ago I wrote about how to set up your Lion Mac to stream media to XBMC on your jailbroken AppleTV 2, since Lion changed the way SMB worked and hence broke SMB streaming. It involved a great wee application called Playback, which streams to a whole bunch of devices including XBMC installations. It avoids having to get your hands dirty in Terminal, but requires a £10 license (a small and well-deserved price to pay).

I’ve had an eye on the usual forums and spotted another method of doing the same thing which also has the advantage of being free and of being able to take advantage of your meticulously organised fanart, posters and .nfo files, something I don’t think Playback does (if it does, please let me know how in the comments).

This alternative uses WebDAV and an application called MediaMaster Server, which is free on the Mac App Store – and seeing as this post is really just for Lion users, that shouldn’t be any barrier to entry. I believe the app is actually meant as a free complement to a paid iPad app for streaming media to your iPad, but it also happens to work nicely with XBMC.

Here’s how you set it up:

1) Download the application and launch it.

2) Click ‘Select root directory’ and navigate to the folder that contains your various media folders. For example, all my various types of media have their own folders, and all of those reside in my ‘Media’ folder on my external drive. That is the folder I’ve used as my root directory.

3) In the settings tab, give yourself a username and password, and click on ‘Secure HTTP’ if you want a secure setup. I left the port as the default.

4) Click the master switch on the left to ON.

5) In XBMC go to setup a new share and navigate to the option that lets you fill in WebDAV (HTTPS) settings.

6) The network address is the local IP address of the computer that’s running MediaMaster Server – for example, 192.168.1.60 (don’t copy that, it’s just an example! Find your own IP address in the Mac’s System Preferences under Network)

7) The port, username and password is whatever you selected in step 3

8) With these details filled in, save it as a source and select it for use. It should detect the various folders within your shared root directory and ask which one you want to use. From here on just set up your folders as unique sources such as TV, Movies, etc.

One thing I’ve noticed with my setup, and it may well be to do with me having a recent nightly build of XBMC as opposed to the approved version, is that scraping is painfully slow. It only needs to do it once, of course, but if it’s taking it’s sweet time you could wait until bedtime before setting it running and in the meantime just access your files through the Videos>Files route in XBMC.

So if you’re having Lion/SMB/XBMC/ATV2 woes you now have two options for getting your media centre up and running again! Good luck and thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.