Apple TV and NAS storage

[Hammie]

I am considering buying Apple TV since a majority of my CD are in ALAC.

However, my question is whether I need to have a computer running in order to stream my music to my Apple TV or whether it is smart enough to stream it directly from the Buffalo LinkStation Live that I have.

I apologize if this was asked before, but I could not find anything in my initial search. Most posts were about using an external drive/device, but not whether it streams directly from it or not.

 

[dmm219]

ATV can only stream from Itunes. If you can't run Itunes on it, the ATV can't stream from it.

(not sure if hacking it would work either)

 

[OllyW]

The only NAS type devices that work with TV are the ones running Windows Home Server. You can run iTunes on them and sync with the TV.

Help and advice on how to set them up can be found here.

 

[ab2650]

Out of the box, the ATV requires you to be running a full iTunes installation (only available on OS X and Windows). Please note that "iTunes server" software that is commonly found on NAS devices or under linux will NOT play directly to the ATV. This will become apparent in how the ATV "links" itself to iTunes instances with a 5-digit PIN.

If you're willing to patchstick your ATV you can open files from SMB/NFS/AFP shares, in your case, directly from the LinkStation. However, there is a big caveat that you will NOT be using the ATV interface, but rather a 3rd party application such as ATVFiles, NitoTV, Boxee/XBMC.

This may be good enough for you. I was in a similar situation with gigs of data on a NAS (ReadyNAS) that I wanted available on the ATV. I found that a patched ATV is pretty useful, especially for playing media encoded to DivX/XviD, but somewhat buggy as it crashes every now and then. My solution was buying a MSI WindPC and a 1TB drive to run iTunes directly on. It serves double duty as a single-drive backup of all the media on the RAIDed NAS.

HTH,
ab