New AppleTV and Synology (NAS)

100% agree. a shame apple see it another way.

Here's what I do.
I sync my iTunes folder to my NAS device (Synology) and then play the content on my XBox if I am in the mood to stream. I also have the older Apple TV to which I sync content from my PC. I think the older Apple TV is a fantastic device. I use Netflix on my XBox and for all the stuff I can sync I use Apple TV's internal storage including pictures which it can sync via Photoshop Albums (very cool feature).

New Apple TV is not for me.

yorkshire2510 wrote:
I have the Synology DS210J NAS drive, and it has a full iTunes server

We have a DS209 here at the office. They are great little devices. It runs 2 1TB drives in a RAID array and we are using it with the Web server, SFTP server, and Surveillance Station services.

I don't know for sure, but I think you can connect to its iTunes server as a "shared library" on Apple TV, however I have not attempted this myself. My manager has one at his house and I'm pretty sure he said it works... mind you as a shared library in that it will only stream from the Synology and not sync. It can't fully sync. He doesn't have ATV2 and hasn't really used ATV1 since he put Plex on his Mac mini. I think he uses the synology as a source in Plex.

A NAS with an "iTunes Server" is running an open-source package called "Firefly Media Server" and while it does support DAAP (iTunes shared libraries) it doesn't support Home Sharing for ATV2 or the pairing protocol used by the classic ATV.

A workaround is to control the Apple TV from a laptop with iTunes 10. iTunes on the laptop can connect to the shared library on the NAS and re-serve it to the Apple TV. You should be able to find the NAS library under "Shared" on iTunes or the Remote app.

My NAS runs DLNA and a Squeezebox server, and they perform well enough for my purposes. I've found Firefly to be slow to find new media and return large lists, and I only have about 10000 tracks across 1000 artists. That is no where near the largest iTunes library I've heard of. The only way to get the performance I want is iTunes on a "real" machine

TWParker wrote:
The only way to get the performance I want is iTunes on a "real" machine

Translation: Mac Mini

I want one myself for the same reason, just hard to justify the cost at the moment. If I got one I'd probably run Plex on it too.

Any update of any NAS's that will work with the new ATV?

Uhm... even if this weas for "simple folk" who don't deal with these things, what is the point of having a device to simplyfy things and see your contenct from one place, if you need to have a separate computer turned on just to stream to this one? To do that sloppy mess, one could just connect the computer that actually has itunes to the TV and be dones with it... I bought one of these (stupidly I'll admit) thinking it could stream over the network from ANY source (like SMB) and now that I see it doesn't, I'm just going to return it and just get a WD instead... So far I was really happy with apple stuff, this particular item has dissapointed...

I have a Synology NAS too and was really unhappy when the new ATV didn't "see it". Luckily for me I have a TV that can see the NAS directly, so I use Apple TV very infrequently. I'd use it a lot more if it could see the NAS, where all our media is located.

The Synology box is a Itunes server, it also acts as a Time Machine, but it's a huge miss not to get the apple tv into the mix. For me, I can afford the $99 bucks to play with the device, but I expect to have to jail break it to get any real use from it.