Play videos from a Raspberry Pi with Samba on Apple TV

Install Samba on the Pi, share a folder with a read-only user, then open it in Samba Oelek.

This is the setup the app was written for: a Raspberry Pi with an external disk, one Samba share, one folder per trip. The Pi runs nothing but Samba. No Plex, no Jellyfin, no daemon that indexes anything.

1. Install Samba and share a folder

sudo apt install samba
sudo mkdir -p /srv/videos

Add a share to /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[Videos]
   path = /srv/videos
   read only = yes
   browseable = yes
   guest ok = no
   valid users = pi

Create the Samba password for the user and restart the service:

sudo smbpasswd -a pi
sudo systemctl restart smbd

If you prefer guest access on a trusted home network, set guest ok = yes and map to guest = Bad User in the [global] section. Guest access was tested, including servers that require signing or encryption.

2. Let the Apple TV find the Pi

Samba on Raspberry Pi OS registers the share with Avahi (Bonjour) when the avahi-daemon package is installed, which it usually is. The Pi then appears on the Samba Oelek network screen by its hostname. If it does not, choose Add Server and enter raspberrypi.local or the IP address.

3. Play

Select the Pi, enter the user and password (or connect as guest), open the share and the folder, play. Thumbnails are generated from the video files themselves.

Performance notes

• The dedicated test server during development was a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. For large 4K files, use a Pi 4 or 5 with wired Ethernet and a USB 3 disk. The Pi only reads bytes; decoding happens on the Apple TV.
• Files larger than 4 GiB are fine. Seeking across the 4 GiB boundary was tested.
• Samba Oelek negotiates SMB 3.1.1 with modern Samba versions, including guest sessions, without dropping to an older dialect.

Checked against: Samba 4 documentation, Samba Oelek README and Raspberry Pi test matrix, 1.0.1. Last checked 2026-09-26.