VLC for iOS

The VLC video player is a very popular free program that seems to be able to play any video files you throw at it. Considering what it can do, it's a meager 22MB download for the Windows version. iTunes is much bigger but cannot play many file formats which is basically what people really want from a video playing program.

While its Windows and Mac versions have been around for a long time, its iOS version is still relatively new. In fact, it seems to run afoul with Apple's App Store policy often resulting in its being yanked off from the store. If you have a network storage server at home, odds are it offers SMB as the primary download protocol because SMB is supported by Windows and Mac OSX. Unfortunately, VLC for iOS still does not support SMB as of March 2015 so that you can stream video files from the NAS to the iPhone and iPad. The good news is the VLC people promise that they will make VLC for iOS support SMB. Their initial work on this is 6 months ago based on the discussion on the VLC forum. Once VLC for iOS supports SMB, it will be a major software development for the iOS in general because Apple seems to want you consume media files via streaming from the Internet and not from your local file server. This is why Netflix and the likes have been available on the iOS for a long time.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

With that said, you can always download media files from the NAS into the iPhone or iPad via FTP. Then you would simply play them locally. As said, VLC for iOS can play a lot of file formats, negating the necessity to re-encode the video file to a iOS friendly format such as M4V.