Home Sharing, media servers or SMB: which one for a folder of videos?

The three ways to get your own videos onto an Apple TV, and when the plain SMB share is enough.

Ask in a forum how to watch videos from a NAS on an Apple TV and you get three answers. They solve different problems.

Home Sharing

Apple’s built-in path. Your Mac imports the videos into the TV app, and the Apple TV plays from that library through the Computers app. It needs a Mac that is switched on and files in formats the TV app accepts. If your videos are on a NAS, the Mac reads them from the NAS and forwards them. When a NAS firmware update turned off SMB 1, more than one person found Home Sharing broke: the Mac, not the Apple TV, had lost its connection to the NAS.

Media servers

Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and the NAS makers’ own apps run a service on the NAS. The service indexes your files, fetches cover art, tracks what you watched and transcodes on the fly. In exchange you install and update a daemon, create an account, and wait for the library scan. This is the right tool for a movie collection watched from several devices.

A plain SMB share

The NAS, Pi, Mac or PC shares a folder. An Apple TV app reads the files straight from that folder. No index, no account, nothing to run on the server. This is what Samba Oelek does: network, folder, video. It fits when you have your own recordings in a handful of folders and want to press play.

Choosing

For the honest list of what Samba Oelek leaves out, see who the app is for.

Checked against: Apple Home Sharing documentation, Samba Oelek README, 1.0.1. Last checked 2026-09-26.