iPad and NAS - Home & About - for Music, Movies, Photo's etc?

[Piggie]

I know the iPad is not really designed as such, especially the built in apps, to do this, but wondered what the best options are out there right now, if any.

Now, before I go any further, I'm saying only your iPad and home NAS unit are going to be up and running. No Mac or PC need to be running to make this work.

Also, you could be at home using WiFi direct or out and about using someone else's WiFi via the Internet to get back to your NAS at home.

On your home NAS unit you hold all your Music, your Videos and your Photo collection, plus let's say some documents. Though as documents tend to take such a small amount of data they are not such an issue, but let's include them anyway for this

So, that's the concept/setup. How practical would it be to get this to work as I suspect many would like something like this to work for them. Access to everything on their iPad anywhere in the world via WiFi without needing to store it on your iPad. Even if the iPad did have enough memory.

I would love Apple to make the iPad be able to work this way out of the box, however as it does not. Are there 3rd party apps that can achieve this?

Also, of course recommendations for a home NAS device which would be suitable for this also.

 

[Chic0]

I have a Synology 211J with a couple of Samsung F4 EcoGreen 2TB hard drives. I find it really easy to use and they also have good software

They currently support the iPhone and Android. You can download DS Photo and DS Audio form the app store. these allow you to view and play media stored on your NAS drive.

They currently have new beta firmware for their NAS boxes. With this software there will be support for ipad too.

http://www.synology.com/us/products/dsm3.1beta/mobile.php

You'll be able to access your media whilst at home and away from home both over the air. I hear the new DS Audio app also supports Airplay too, so you can stream music from nas to ipad and play through Airport express speakers. The DS Photo app also allows you to stream videos to your device also

I have been using the current DS Audio app with my iPhone 4 and works really well.

You can read more about the Synology DSM software here : http://www.synology.com/enu/products/features/user_interface.php

 

[Piggie]

Thanks ChicO

Will take a look at that. Do you have to convert video to iPad format and store this on the NAS for this to steam to the iPad?

 

[Chic0]

hmmmm I've never streamed movies to my iPhone, so I'm not sure.

I know there is a setting for transcoding file types, but I don't recall seeing formats like AVI.

Have a look on the site. There is also the synology forum too

http://forum.synology.com/enu/

You might find your answer there or if not, sign up and start new thread.

 

[Night Spring]

I haven't tried these yet, but seems like an interesting product.
http://www.pogoplug.com/