Stream videos stored on a NAS Drive to all of my devices?

[m021478]

I've never owned a Network Attached Storage drive before so I could use a little guidance...

Would I be able to use a NAS drive to store terabytes of videos I've accumulated over the years, and then be able to stream those videos to my various Macs and iOS devices seamlessly (both inside and outside of my local network)?

If yes, can you guys give me some recommendations for a NAS drive that plays nicely with Macs and that has a great user interface (and maybe an iOS app for access on my iPad/iPhone)? Thanks!

 

[Boyd01]

I use a 2014 Mini as a server instead of a NAS, which makes it very simple. I started doing this back around 2016, so I just used iTunes with home sharing enabled and my media library on an external disk. Have gone through several changes, but currently using a 4 tb USB external SSD which contains about 2tb of media. It doesn't take much of a Mac for this, I'm using the lowly base 1.4ghz/4gb 2014 Mini which is still running Mojave so I can use iTunes. However, you should be able to use the built-in media sharing on newer versions of MacOS for the same thing. One advantage of this is that it works with movies you purchase from Apple where a NAS would not.

Works really well with two Apple TV's, a Mac, iPad and iPhone with no apps required, but it's only available inside my local network. Awhile ago, somebody suggested a clever solution to share your media beyond your network, by setting the iTunes (or the newer TV app) library location to an iCloud folder, then copying all your media to iCloud. I have not tried this myself however.

Now, another solution would be to use a NAS that supports a third party solution like Plex. But this won't work with media you purchase from Apple, due to copy protection. Of course, you can always access your Apple-purchased media via iCloud anyway, so maybe that's not a big deal anymore. Will leave it to somebody else to explain solutions like Plex since I have no experience.

 

[DarkPremiumCho]

Streaming seamlessly outside of your LAN is the tricky part. You will at least need

• your Internet gateway accessible from outside seamlessly, either by a fixed IP address or DDNS
• ample upload bandwidth
• your NAS discoverable, by port forwarding, or VPN, etc
• firewall configured for security