Can someone help recommend a setup that will enable me to play files up to 60GB on an Apple TV? All I have tried so far is to stream from Plex from a Mac over wifi and that maxes out at about 20GB files. What options do I have networking wise? Could I buy a NAS and plug directly into the ethernet port or does the Apple TV have to work over wifi?
The low end new ATV doesn’t have Ethernet but the high end one does.
Newer WiFi types can be much faster than Ethernet. I prefer Ethernet since that eliminates the voodoo of radio waves.
You can use SMB, FTP, Plex should work as long as you have everything set correctly. There are so many variables that there’s not one perfect answer to your questions.
Heck, it could be an issue with file codecs or encoding.
I just want to stream the files direct from a hard drive, preferably a NAS so I can backup my library, to Infuse. Does the actual stream of the movie go through ethernet?
So basically what I need to do is connect the both the NAS and the Apple TV to the router? I can’t just connect the Apple TV to the NAS like it’s an external drive?
Correct. Having both hardwired is your best chance. You don’t have to use Plex either, unless you want to. Just a regular file transfer protocol like NFS or SMB works fine for full 4K video files.
I would very strongly recommend a dedicated NAS as opposed to trying to do something through your Mac.
I know there are other threads about it, but make sure you start off bigger than you need to and allow for expandability (Don’t forget redundancy). I’ve already had to get a second NAS and start upgrading the drives on the first…
I don’t think I can setup this way since my network is just a Eero routers plugged into the wall. I was hoping there was to just get local drives playing on the Apple TV. Not entirely sure a NAS would even add any benefit since it’s playing over wifi still.
You need to be able to access the drives with a IP address which means they need to be routed somehow. Maybe you could put a new router between the two that connects wirelessly to your other router?
One thing to note, too, even if you could get your setup to play a large file, if it’s not fast enough with plenty of extra bandwidth, doing things like seeking or skipping it’s gonna be really slow
yes, I’m seeing why people recommend Zidoos and the like for local streaming now. what a pain. I’d like to have everything integrated into the Apple TV itself.
I just did a speed test on my Apple TV and it’s 266Mbps. That should be fast enough if I have the NAS connected to the router and sharing via SMB right?
Yes, that is fast enough for anything 4K
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I have a Synology DS1522+ with 100TB for our 2500+ DVD/Blu-Ray/4K UHD Movie/TV Collection, I use ATV 4K (7 of them, 1 for each room), gigabit network with 5Ghz wireless, mixed use on ATVs, connected to 4K TVs, I do use Make MKV but only for DVD ripping, for Blu-Ray & 4K I use TsMuxer with anydvdhd and Xreveal to decrypt, mind you these are our own purchased movies, no piracy here, the originals are the backups and the digital rips are for convenience and ease-of-use. We use infuse pro for playback on ATV 4K, works near perfectly, if setup properly there’s no studdering, or buffering other than a few seconds at beginning or chapter seek/ FFW/REW, there is no recompression its just smb share to infuse. So effectively full Blu-ray/UHD playback. This is my magnum opus. My life’s work.
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