I recently set up Boxee on my Apple TV and have started using it for all of my media needs. While it’s great at using RSS feeds for torrents, having to SSH in to my Apple TV every time I wanted to start some random video downloading was growing to be a bit of a pain. So I decided to utilize MacFUSE and sshfs to mount a torrent dropbox so that I could just save torrents directly to the dropbox without manually SCP-ing them over to the Apple TV.

First you’ll need to install MacFUSE version 2.0 or greater. Once the installation is complete, you will need to get sshfs to actually mount the remote folder to your local box. The easiest way is just to grab it off of SVN by typing the following in the Terminal:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ svn co http://macfuse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/filesystems/sshfs/binary sshfs-binaries

Once you’ve done that, you should copy over the correct binary (either tiger or leopard) to your $PATH somewhere, (I chose /opt/local/bin:

$ cp sshfs-binaries/sshfs-static-leopard /opt/local/bin/sshfs

Now you’re ready to actually do the mounting. You will need a point on the filesystem to put the mount, I chose /mnt. We simply need to perform the actual mounting now. Enter this command (assuming that your Apple TV can be SSH-ed into via appletv.local:

$ mkdir -p /mnt/boxee-torrent-drop
$ sshfs frontrow@appletv.local:/Users/frontrow/Library/Application\ Support/BOXEE/UserData/Torrents /mnt/boxee-torrent-drop

When prompted for a password enter frontrow (or whatever your SSH password for your Apple TV is) and it should execute without error. If you now browse in the Finder to /mnt you should see a MacFUSE drive icon alias pointing to your Boxee torrents folder. You can drag this mount to your Finder sidebar and whenever you save a torrent just save it to that directory. Boxee will now automatically pick it up and start downloading it!

For bonus points, you could take this and:

1. Run it as a LoginItem so that you’re always mounted.
2. Set up remote SSH access to your Apple TV so that you can start torrents from anywhere in the world (please change your SSH password first).

Enjoy!