Apple TV conundrum

FishFluff

FishFluff

FishFluff

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Does anyone know if it's possible to have an Apple TV (3rd gen) play content from a NAS? At the moment I access all my content using home sharing from my iMac but having to store all my media on that machine is a pain in the dong. :(

I've seen that a lot of NAS boxes have some kind of iTunes server in their spec sheets but from reading around I'm under the impression that wouldn't do the trick.

Any ideas?
 
forgive me if i'm mistaken, but isn't the Apple TV 3 basically an exact copy of the media player available from a competitor retailing at £24.99 :confused: (even down to the same internals)

apart from the fact that it's heavily locked down into iTunes?
 
ATV needs iTunes. However, if you have an iPad/iPhone you could use a video playing app to stream to the ATV.
 
Not directly (unfortunately).

You would have to:
  • Store your data on the NAS
  • Have another computer switched on running iTunes which is pointed at the media on the NAS
  • Have the ATV paired to iTunes running on the other machine

Of course, any media you have which won't play in iTunes will have to be converted to mp4 using Handbrake or similar software before this will work.

Alternatively, as Shine says, play the media on your iPhone/iPad and AirPlay to the ATV.

The other alternative is to get an ATV2, jailbreak it and install XBMC. That will play pretty much any file type and will read straight off a NAS but of course it's limited to 720p.
 
glen8 said:
forgive me if i'm mistaken, but isn't the Apple TV 3 basically an exact copy of the media player available from a competitor retailing at £24.99 :confused: (even down to the same internals)

apart from the fact that it's heavily locked down into iTunes?
Click to expand...
Highly doubt it. The AppleTV2 is basically an iPhone4 in a densely packedbox utilising one seriously low power supply unit making it one of the lowest powered media players around. I've no idea about the ATV3 tbh, but I assume it contains the iPad 2 SoC within and more onboard ram (for buffering).

I myself have a jailbroken ATV2 running XBMC amongst other stuff and it streams media off my network superbly. XMBC is the way forward for the OP. A non-jailbroken ATV unit is just a waste of time tbh.
 
Thanks for the answers guys. Fingers crossed someone figures out a way to jailbreak the ATV v3 as I can't see Apple allowing it to play non iTunes-ed content any time soon.

Either that or they bring out a Movies/TV version of iTunes match. That would be all kinds of badass.
 
I bought an ATV3 with the assumption it had been jailbroken by now. I was intending to put xbmc on it, so was dissapointed at first. Then had a play around with iTunes and converter software and decided its just as easy to stick with iTunes!

Iflicks is brilliant - using it on the recommendation of someone on here. Just drag in an mkv and it converts it in a few (literally) minutes, adds all the meta data and cover, and puts it into iTunes (the actual file can be anywhere on the network)

Best thing about this is all your media is automatically in the right format to be transferred to iPad / iPhone, so can be streamed in the house on any device or transferred to the actual device.

I've spent years trying to hack things and find workarounds...finding it quite liberating to just accept the Apple Eco system in full!
 
Yeah, I was using AnyVideoConverter before, which did the same thing, but without the meta scraping - that really adds a lot, especially when you transfer to the iPad :)
 
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