Best way to watch home movies from iCloud?

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Best way to watch home movies from iCloud?

This Christmas I wanted to be able to watch on our Apple TV our 30 hours (approx.) of home movies, broken into about 1 to 2 hour QuickTimes, with my extended family. I did this easily with my iMac turned on, watching movies playing back from my iMac that had been copied into in iTunes. Then i decided that I wanted to watch them from a cloud of some sort so my iMac could be turned off. I compared pricing plans for cloud storage and it actually seems that Apple has the best deal, $120 per year for 2 TB. I explored copying and playing back movies from Google Drive (which I use heavily for work), Dropbox etc.... but I went with Apple for their better storage pricing.

However I am a bit astounded and bemused by how difficult it was to implement what I would imagine every single citizen wants to do: easily copy and watch home movies. It seems you have two choices: use iMovie Theater, which I cannot get on my machine as I am using OSX 10.5.5 (for Avid compatibility reasons with work I do at home; I am a professional video editor). I have the old iMovie 9.09, and cannot upgrade until i upgrade my OS, and I don't believe this has iMovie Theater. Also i read online that iMovie Theater has a movie length limit of 15 minutes! What the heck?? Why? I thought Apple was the "video professional"? I in fact have used Apple for over 15 years to edit films on Premiere, FCP, FCPX, and now Avid. Why on earth would they limit the movie length in iMovie Theater. Bizarre.

But of course you can also use Photos, which I have done. It works fine, but I had to re-copy all those same movies into the Photos library on my iMac (with the same sense of irony about copying movies into an app called Photos, that I had when copying them into an app called iTunes), then let them upload (took about 4 days)... now I can play back a 2-hour home movie Quicktime from iCloud Photos on the AppleTV no problem... but one small complaint: it seems that you cannot see any textual information, i.e. the name of the clip (or any photos for that matter). This feature would be nice, and actually sort of obvious to me, but... so am I missing something? Is there a way to see movie names or photo names in iCloud Photos?

Apple TV, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Jan 1, 2018 10:12 AM

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Answer 1

kapple21

Level 3

858 points

Jan 2, 2018 8:01 AM in response to Joshua Pearson

Apple TV developers are currently unable to stream from iCloud Drive, if they did you could download an app for example, Infuse allows you to stream from iCloud Drive on their iOS apps but not their tvOS app. Since this is currently not available and as you said Photos and iMovie Theatre are not giving you the desired outcome, I can give you a potential alternative.

I have had the same problem and I have utilised these two options to overcome the problem. On your Mac, go to System Preferences, Sharing, turn on File Sharing, add the folder that contains the home videos, click Options then make sure SMB is checked. You could then download an app on your Apple TV, for example VLC or Infuse, which will be able to stream the home video folder from your Mac to you Apple TV. This will mean that your Mac must remain on (or in Sleep Mode) and connected to power and internet. This will only allow you to stream your home videos while you are in the same network as your Mac. However, Plex is another application that can be installed on you Mac, TV and phone which does the same as the file sharing method, but also allows you to access your home videos from any location.

Also if you have your home videos on iTunes, you could turn on Home Sharing on both your Mac and Apple TV which will allow you to access your Mac’s iTunes library from the Computer app on Apple TV.

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