I believe there are a few people here with a Synology Diskstation. Have any of you used it to deliver content to an Apple TV? I have someone with Apple TVs on all their TVs already, and they're looking for a way to get photos and videos that have been taken with their mobile devices and cameras onto their TVs.

I'm not familiar with how an Apple TV works since I don't own one, but I know that the Synology runs a standard DLNA server for all of that stuff, as well as being an SMB file share, so if Apple TV supports showing media from either of those things, it should theoretically just work. I know that I can directly use my Playstation 3 or my Xbox to display photos and videos that are stored on the NAS, no problem.

I'm not sure whether there is a super-easy path for copying the photos and videos from the mobile devices onto the NAS. For me, the path always involves copying those things onto my PC first, then copying those things up to the NAS. Not difficult, but it's two steps rather than one.

Synology has some mobile apps like Photo Station and Video Station which run on the mobile devices, I wonder if those will support directly uploading those things to the NAS from the phone? I never tried.

And this page says DLNA doesn't help:

http://store.apple.com/us/question/answe...HU7CK9PKP77FD27

Although this page makes it seem like AppleTV is directly supported....
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/5.0/multimedia

... the thing to keep in mind is that what they're saying they support is AirPlay. There's a difference. Here's the difference:

AirPlay means that if I have the Synology app on my phone, or I'm looking at the Synology library on my PC, then I will get a button (within that app) which lets me stream the video I'm watching to the TV set that the AppleTV is hooked up to. It's just like Chromecast in that regard, in this situation the AppleTV is just working like a Chromecast does. But for that to work, I have to be running the app. I've personally done this successfully because I visited a friend with an AppleTV and I streamed stuff from my home server via Plex, so I can see how that works. The link above is describing that process.

The thing that I think your users are looking for is something different: You turn on the TV on the AppleTV's input, and, you pick up the AppleTV remote control, and you use THAT to browse the contents of your shared library and play videos and photos and stuff. That's the part that I don't know about.

Now, I know that there is an option on Synology to have it be your iTunes Library server. They have a whole separate iTunes server app for the diskstation. Here's how it works:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/tutorials/521

But the thing is, that only talks about music, not photos and videos. So I don't know.

Okay, here's the thing I was looking for before:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/app_packages/iTunesServer

It's the actual iTunes Server App that runs on the diskstation. That seems to say it will work for music and videos but doesn't mention photos.

AppleTV (second and third generation, aka the black pucks) only do photo sharing over the LAN via Home Sharing. Home Sharing is iTunes only, no 3rd party has cracked how it works.



The older iTunes Server was only supported with the First gen Apple TV (white hot running boxes).

No Apple device natively supports DLNA. iTunes Server is based on an alternate standard that predates DLNA a little bit, but never saw adoptance outside the Apple world. DLNA is heavily tied to uPnP, whereas the iTunes Server is more bound to Bonjour (a uPnP alternative).


If cloud solutions are in the mix, it opens the following paths for photos to the Apple TV puck units:

- iCloud Photo Streams. Both personal and shared photo streams. I currently use this method for my Apple TV.

- Flickr, which still offers 1TB of photo storage for free

- (Coming soon) iCloud Photo Library, currently in open beta. This will move peoples photo libraries to be hosted in iCloud and accessible to any iOS device, Apple TV, Mac or Windows machine. iCloud users get 5GB free of storage, and can buy additional storage. I plan to migrate to this once they have the Mac part released. This is the move that is also killing off iPhoto and Apeture on the Mac in favor of a new photo editing program that runs on iCloud Libraries.

Thanks for the responses guys. I guess I should clarify that it's not necessary that the content be pushed through the Apple TV or, if done on the Apple TV, has to be browsable via remote on the Apple TV.

I've played with the Photo Station app a little, but it's very strange. It will back up photos taken on the mobile devices to the NAS, but you really don't have a ton of control over how they're stored. I also don't know if the Photo Station app is capable of AirPlay.

Tom, the person I'm helping really wants to store the content on his NAS and view it from there.

If they don't mind using their phones to control it, then Airplay is supported, they can use the AppleTV just like a Chromecast in that regard. The Synology and Plex apps will just cast to the TV.

I'm not sure either since I haven't been using the PhotoStation app.

But I know it works with Plex. All I have to do is make sure the photos end up on the NAS in one of the folders which is indexed by Plex, and they show right up on the Plex app on the phone, and cast to the TV without trouble. The only drawback is that Plex charges a few bucks to install the app on your phone.

Understandable, but not possible via official means currently, unless you go the AirPlay route. My initial post is all the official methods available without using Airplay (the path Tony is explaining)

One alternate path would be if they own a second generation (720p) Apple TV and are willing to go the jailbreak route. That opens the possibility to get a DLNA client on the device. This won't work with 3rd generation (1080p) units though, no jailbreak exist for them, and people have been trying for years now. One polished route for this is FireCore. I used this on the old first gen AppleTV, and it was well worth the small price.

A different alternate path is PlexConnect. (Thanks Tony for the Plex reminder) . There is hints PlexConnect can now run on a Synology NAS. Basic concept, it acts as a proxy to the AppleTV and is able to inject Plex content into the standard AppleTV software. I haven't had time to try this out myself, but it looks promising. It is a hacky way to do it, will likely be fragile, and needs updating from time to time.

Yeah, PhotoStation is entirely unlike the Video and Audio content stored on the Synology. It seems you have to go through their proprietary UI somehow to upload photos, instead of just pointing it at your fileshares the way that you do for videos and music.

(Gee, I don't know of ANY device that requires proprietary uploading software! )

However, if you stick Plex onto the NAS, then Plex will happily index the photos in exactly the same way as the videos and music: Just point it at the fileshares.

I don't really know for sure about photo's, but the only way to get anything playing on the Apple TV if it's not MP4 format is by transcoding it. That is where those new DS214play or QNAP TS-X51 series come in, since those come with hardware transcoding (Intel Quicksync). Theoretically this means the Apple TV should be able to play anything you throw at it, but I've read in practice it still doesn't work quite as smooth as it is supposed to be. Plex is probably still the best option, since it'll also do transcoding, but unfortunately not (yet?) in hardware. This means you'll need a pretty powerful NAS for this to work without hiccups.

This is true about the hardware transcoding.

In my experience, though, I've found that I really need to have both Plex (which doesn't yet do the hardware transcoding) and VideoStation (which does). Some things will play only on Plex because it has a wider range of transcoders, and some things will play satisfactorily only on VideoStation (due to the hardware transcoding).

Still waiting for the day when Plex will also do the hardware transcoding on the DS214play.

Tony,

I know this doesn't help you, but I've been reading that the new DS415+ model might just be capable of playing HD content via Plex now. I think users are saying they've gotten up to 1080p, but apparently it pegs the CPU...