How to Add an External Hard Drive to Your Boxee Box

How to Add an External Hard Drive to Your Boxee Box

This guide will take you step by step through the process of adding an external USB hard drive to your Boxee Box.

How to Add an External Hard Drive to Your Boxee Box Ir?t=rockmusicdail-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0038JE07O

It will also show you how to index the contents of that drive so that you can easily play it all on your Boxee Box.

Start out by powering off your Boxee Box. Plug your USB hard drive (or thumb drive) into one of the two available USB ports. If your USB hard drive is a ‘powered’ one, plug it in as well.

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Power on your Boxee Box. Once you get to the dashboard, select the Files option from the upper-right corner.

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Scroll down to the section titled Local folders and network shares. From here, you’ll see your USB hard drive listed. As illustrated in the image below, there can often be more than one “entry” for a single hard drive. Select the first one (in my case, the ‘drive’ is titled EFI).

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Again, as illustrated in the image below, this ‘drive’ contains no files. Navigate back to the main Files section.

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This time, select the other ‘drive’ listed in the Local folders and network sharessection (if you had more than one).

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From here you should see a list of the files and folders on the USB hard drive. In some cases, a list of ‘hidden’ folders may be revealed. The hidden folders typically start with a period (.) – but can vary depending on how your USB hard drive is formatted.

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Select one of the folders on your USB hard drive. In my example, I selected the TV Shows folder on my drive. From here, a list of all my sub-folders is displayed.

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To index all of the files in a folder (in my example, the TV Shows folder), select the “action” button from the upper-left corner of your screen. It appears as a “plus sign” ( + ) inside of a box (see image below).

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From here you select all the options for indexing this folder (and all of its sub-folders). In the Share Name field, enter a name. Ideally one that’s fairly descriptive.

Select the Media Type. Since I’m indexing a series of video files, I’ve selectedVideo from the list.

Because I’ll be adding to this folder fairly frequently, I’ve set the Type of Scanningto daily. If you don’t plan on making changes to a specific folder, you can selectOnce so that it gets indexed, and then doesn’t need to be every day going forward.

When you’re done, click the Add on-screen button.
A small “windshield wiper” icon will appear in the upper-right corner of your screen. This means the folder is currently being indexed by the Boxee software.
After a few minutes, you should be able to return to the main menu and select theShows option (assuming like me, you indexed a series of TV shows). If you opted to index a different type of media (Movies, Music etc) – select that entry from the main menu.

Don’t be surprised if all of the contents of the drive/folder haven’t been added yet. It can take quite a while to index a drive with lots of files.

If you’re adding audio files (music, podcasts etc) – repeat the above process, but when asked for the Media Type, select Music.
Again, Boxee will notify you that the folder is being indexed.

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That’s it! Just keep repeating this process to add all of the files on your drive so that you can play them via your Boxee Box..

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