Synology Media Services with Apple TV

Synology NAS is friendly to playing multimedia to your various devices such as Roku, XBox, PlayStation, and AppleTV. However with the AppleTV, because Apple's refusal to join the industry standard DLNA ecosystem instead running its own proprietary protocol Airplay, you need an intermediary device to play media files stored on the Synology NAS onto the TV to which the AppleTV is attached.

Below is an article that explains in detail on how this is done.

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/87489-setting-up-synology-nas-media-services-with-apple-tv

One thing to be aware though. Because the Synology disk station manager (DMS), the operating system that runs the NAS hardware, supports Airplay, once the video has played, the NAS communicates directly with the AppleTV. In other words, the iOS DS Video app only acts as the initial connection between the NAS and the AppleTV. Once that is done, the DS Video app and the iDevice can be moved away from the connection or even turned off and the video file still plays.

I wish Apple would allow the AppleTV the ability to browse SMB shares such as those on the Synology NAS. This would make life a lot easier for people who own AppleTV and Synology NAS. Incidentally, Apple desktop operating systems version 10.8 or higher supports the network share protocol SMB and SMB2 by default. Its proprietary older protocol AFP is still supported+
, but you have to explicitly key that in when connecting to network shares. As such, why Apple cannot simply include this SMB support in AppleTV? One reason is Apple wants you to access media files that are on the Internet exclusively. SMB access is accessing these files locally within your home network. In other words, if the media files are stored in the cloud, you are only in possession of the files as long as you pay for their storage on a subscription. You would stream them to your devices as needed. No storage of any files locally on servers such as the Synology NAS which you purchase once and use as long as the hardware lasts. According to Apple, even with media files that you created such as home videos of your kid's birthday party should be stored in the cloud, preferably in your iCloud drive to which Apple gives you the initial 5GB of storage for free.